BLAME IT ON THE BARD!

Don’t blame the usually faultless American novelist Anne Tyler for an adaptation of The Taming Of The Shrew that is as arch and as confected as a Richard Curtis film... she hated the original

Vinegar Girl Anne Tyler Hogarth Shakespeare €22.50 ★★★★★

The world of publishing is always full of odd schemes, but few odder than the current one to commission wellknown authors to write novels based on different plays by Shakespeare. The pay is pretty good – £200,000 a pop, from what I hear – and, perhaps as a consequence, the publishers have been able to attract high-calibre novelists such as Margaret Atwood and Howard Jacobson.

But it’s hard to know what the point of it all is. ‘For more than 400 years, Shakespeare’s works have been performed, read and loved throughout the world,’ reads a brief explanatory note at the back of each volume. ‘They have been reinterpreted for each new generation, whether as teen films, musicals, science-fiction flicks, Japanese warrior tales or literary transformations.’

And that’s it: an explanation that avoids the question ‘Why?’ On the other hand, some of the most serious novelists often struggle to know what to write next, so may welcome a plot or a theme being presented on a plate. After all, Shakespeare made free with other writers’ tales, so why not make free with his?

The American novelist Anne Tyler does not, at first, seem a natural fit with Shakespeare. Her novels are all contemporary, based in her home city of Baltimore, and deal with the infinite shades and nuances of family life, generally from the mother’s point of view. In many ways she is the antithesis of Shakespeare: her characters do their best to rub along and tend to avoid the dramatic gesture, the overpowering speech. There are no murders, and few declarations of love. When her characters clash, they are not bearing guns or swords: they are more likely to be putting the cutlery back in the drawer, or preparing to go on holiday.

‘I don’t have murder mysteries, suspense or real events,’ she once said. ‘I rely on time to do my plotting: people having babies, marrying, dying, just normal things that happen.’ Her poetry lies in the mundane and derives from the comings and goings of unshowy people.

It was thus particularly surprising to hear that the work of Shakespeare she had chosen to rejig was The Taming Of The Shrew, the play that is nowadays seen as his most anti-woman and reactionary, ending, as it does, with a woman willingly submitting to the command of a man. Tyler has admitted that her choice had more than a touch of perversity about it. ‘I hate it,’ she said in a recent interview. ‘It’s totally misogynistic. I know it thinks it’s funny but it’s not. People behave meanly to each other, every single person.’ The Taming Of The

Shrew – which has already been reworked in the musical Kiss Me, Kate and, more recently, the highschool movie 10 Things I Hate

About You – involves two sisters, the hot-tempered Katharina (the shrew of the title) and the more easygoing Bianca. Their bossy father will not let Bianca marry before Katharina, so a schemer called Petruchio decides to help a friend who wants to marry Bianca by wooing Katharina, his reward being her dowry. His courtship of her is thus entirely insincere: Say she rail; why, I’ll tell her plain She sings as sweetly as a nightingale. Say that she frown; I’ll say she looks as clear As morning roses newly wash’d with dew. How, then, does Tyler deal with subject matter that seems so at odds with her own view of humanity? Vinegar Girl opens like so many other Tyler novels, with a woman performing a humdrum task, then being inter-

rupted. ‘Kate Battista was gardening out back when she heard the telephone ring in the kitchen. She straightened up and listened. Her sister was in the house, although she might not be awake yet. But then there was another ring, and two more after that, and when she finally heard her sister’s voice it was only the announcement on the answering machine. “Hi-yee! It’s us? We’re not home, looks like? So leave a –”

‘By that time Kate was striding toward the back steps, tossing her hair off her shoulders with an exasperated “Tcch!” She wiped her hands on her jeans and yanked the screen door open. “Kate,” her father was saying, “pick up.” ’

Any creative writing course might usefully study this opening. It seems so natural, so relaxed, yet in barely a hundred words it conveys so much: Kate’s irritability and scruffiness, her sister’s laziness and sense of ease, their father’s presumption that Kate is at his beck-and-call.

A few pages later, on a chore for her father, Kate meets Pyotr Scherbakov, his laboratory assistant (and the counterpart to Shakespeare’s Petruchio). Their meeting does not get off to a good start. When Kate snaps at her father, Pyotr says: ‘Just like the girls in my country. So rude-spoken.’

‘Just like the women,’ Kate said reprovingly. ‘Yes, they also. The grandmothers and the aunties.’

Their conversation goes from bad to worse. Her father boasts to Pyotr, “Kate makes my sandwich for me every single night before she goes to bed. She’s very domestic.” Kate blinked. “Peanut butter, though,” Pyotr said. “Well, yes.” “Yes, Pyotr said with a sigh. He sent her a look of regret. “But is certainly pretty enough.” “You should see her sister.” ’ Kate works, grudgingly, as a teacher’s assistant at a pre-school, a task made none the easier by her constant irritation with her charges. ‘Why you hate small children?’ asks Pyotr, at one stage. ‘Well, they’re not very bright, if you’ve noticed,’ she replies.

The scenes in The Little People’s School are to my mind the best in the novel, full of pin-sharp dialogue and little details that other, more pompous novelists tend to overlook. Tyler is masterful at showing both the comedy and the tragedy in people at odds with what the world expects of them. ‘Fine, be that way,’ says Kate, stomping off when a toddler refuses to lie down in Quiet Rest Time.

Tyler’s plots generally have an organic feel to them, developing through the characters, rather than through external contrivances. But, perhaps because of its need to echo The Taming Of The Shrew, Vinegar Girl is different, its various twists and turns seeming to be imposed from above.

Kate’s father relies on Pyotr in his laboratory; Pyotr faces deportation if he can’t get a Green Card. Something must be done. ‘Would you be willing to marry Pyotr?’ ‘Please tell me you’re not serious.’ Pyotr is eager to go along with the plan, particularly as he fancies Kate. He struggles to understand her reluctance. ‘Was inconsiderate of us to ask you to deceive your government… I think Americans feel guilt about such things.’

‘It wasn’t just inconsiderate,’ she said. ‘It was piggish and self-centered and insulting and… despicable.’ ‘Aha! A shrew.’ “‘Where?” she asked, and she spun around to look toward the shrubbery behind her.’

I never thought I’d say this of a novel by Anne Tyler, who usually writes as naturally as a bird sings, but it all seems much too contrived, and the ending, which even has a goody-two-shoes speech by Kate (‘it’s hard being a man. Have you ever thought about that?… I’m giving him space in a place where we can both be ourselves’) has something of the arch, confected air of a Richard Curtis film. Along the way there are plenty of little delights, but, in this instance, Shakespeare has proved a burden rather than a spur. Just as The Taming Of The Shrew is minor Shakespeare, so Vinegar Girl is minor Tyler.

Tyler’s choice has more than a touch of perversity to it – she hates the Bard’s most misogynistic play