Reading Anne Tyler

I enjoy the Christmas holidays because this is one the few times each year I can devote myself without distraction to reading. I read fiction throughout the year, but this time is particularly special. It’s time that I reserve for the old classics, books that are rich and thoughtful, but at times quite demanding on the reader. This past Christmas was the first exception to this tradition in many years. I read “The Amateur Marriage” by Anne Tyler. It’s available right now as a pocket paperback, a format usually reserved for mass market fiction intended as light entertainment, but of limited artistic value. Not the sort of fiction I normally care for. One exception to this is Anne Tyler. This latest is her sixteenth and perhaps her most mature novel. It is a subtle, unexciting, but remarkable book. It affirms her place as one of my favourite writers.

I discovered the books of Anne Tyler during my university years. My course load in English lit. had me fully immersed in dense, abstract and intellectual fiction, written by now dead writers who were more interested in the craft of writing, than in the craft of story telling. It was a refreshing, enjoyable diversion; engaging an unpretentious writer, both easy in her language, and direct in her story-telling. Deceptively simple but with an acute perception of the human condition, her novels are heartbreaking and brimming with gentle sympathy, yet written without sloppy sentiment. Literature is one of our art-forms. Artistic work should not be intellectual. It should be experienced through feeling. Anne Tyler understands this. Her books are honest.

If you’ve never read her, you may know her from the movie “The Accidental Tourist” which is based on her novel of the same name. One of my favourite movies, it perfectly captures the subtlety and intonation of her writing.

Her characters are very ordinary and the story elements are typically a string of vignettes describing rather mundane events that in themselves are actually, well quite boring. By the end of her novels you realize that almost nothing has happened, yet everything has in fact happened – these are the stories of complete lives. Significant episodes in life are downplayed, whereas in the fictions of other writers, these events are often heightened or exaggerated. They become a focal point for the dramatic tension of the story – often it is either the trigger point for an avalanche of successive events, or as the culmination of a downward spiral of events after the character has lost control. In an Anne Tyler novel, breakups, deaths, tragedies have lingering consequences, but they are just a few of the many events that fill one’s life.

My favourite Anne Tyler novel is “Saint Maybe”. It is about a seventeen year old boy making plans for college and eager for the rest of his life to happen. There is an accident and his older brother dies. He blames himself for the death, gives up on all his dreams and takes a menial job to take care of his brother’s children. Time passes, and his brother’s children grow up while he remains chaste. At the end of the novel in his forties, he meets someone he learns to love and the novel ends. That’s it, but it’s touching.

It’s been about 12 years since I’ve read “Saint Maybe”, but I remember a chapter that describes him fixing the porch of his neighbour. In the next chapter, he is again fixing the neighour’s porch - but it’s five or eight years later. Everything remains the same, yet everything is different. Change goes unnoticed.

A brother dies. It’s a big moment, but it happens and it is over, not consciously referred to again. This novel is not about “big” moments, it is about the accumulation of smaller moments. It is about duty, about growing up, awaiting redemption, and forgiving oneself when there is realization no one holds you accountable. But mostly it is about how a good person will end up in the right place no matter which path is taken.