A Slipping-Down Life (1970)

In some ways it's hard to recognize Anne Tyler's third novel as an Anne Tyler novel. It's not set in Baltimore, perhaps most notably, but North Carolina, where Tyler went to college. There's a Black maid here who comes awfully close to a certain sassy stereotype, which surprised me coming from Tyler. This short novel is just weird in lots of ways, though Tyler's preoccupations with love among the repressed and/or introspective are at least discernible. But her understanding of rock music verges on bizarre, for one thing, although it also unexpectedly delivers some of the vibe of the Carpenters' "Superstar," which came out in 1971. Our semi-demi-hero, Bertram "Drumstrings" Casey, has a kind of loud troubadour act he puts on at the roadhouse. What sets him apart is his spontaneous "speaking out," which sounds closer to Elvis Presley interludes than between-songs banter or political screeds. He's a lost soul and spoiler not really found. Meanwhile, the real hero is Evie Decker, who is overweight and an outcast in her school social system. She has one friend, also overweight—it's Tyler's detail but didn't strike me as fat-shaming or unlikely. They are intrigued by Drum Casey and go out to see him. For reasons unclear—this is where the novel starts being unlikely—Evie uses nail scissors to carve the name "Casey" in her forehead backwards (as she's using a mirror in the bathroom at the club). This is not treated with any of the perfectly appropriate alarm it would be given nowadays. It bears some of the extremity of the fan / celebrity dynamic as we know it now, but it's also treated as vaguely comical, with the backwards carving. It's too much. Even 50 years later we haven't seen much face work like this, have we? Maybe a couple upside-down crosses and Post Malone's face tattoos? I must be forgetting something. Anyway, thus begins the strange and often strangely unnatural and ultimately pointless relationship of Drum Casey, 19, and Evie Decker, 17. Tyler was 27 or so when she wrote it and already it's her third novel, but it's hard to see what she was aiming for. In many ways it feels almost willfully misunderstanding of rock music or anything about it in 1970—much, indeed, like the Carpenters song, which is nonetheless somehow more haunting than this often strained little novel.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.