If Morning Ever Comes (1964)

Anne Tyler’s first novel was published when she was 22, which is impressive in itself. She had not yet discovered Baltimore—this is set in North Caroliina, where she was raised. Many of the elements we associate with Tyler are here, but not yet quite in focus. It’s about a big family of misfits and emotionally wounded. Some tend toward the isolated eccentric brooders she would later sharpen to a fine edge. Others are the natural healers and binding elements of families, dysfunctional by nature but, again, not quite as sharply drawn. In fact, many of her characters here tend toward more undifferentiated blends of these two favored Tyler types. The Hawkes family is big—six girls and one boy, Ben Joe. Ben Joe (not to be confused with banjo) is 25 and has just started law school at Columbia, but he worries about his family living in the small town of Sandhill, North Carolina. It’s November and he skips a week of school to take the train down to visit them. Various antics ensue. His older sister left her husband in Kansas and has shown up in Sandhill with her baby. Their father was a doctor who kept a mistress and died of a heart attack at her place. Their mother is bitter and depressed. Their grandmother is kooky. Tyler would get much better with kooky characters. The other five sisters have some distinguishing traits—two are twins, Jenny is on the road to becoming isolated and eccentric—but they’re more like a blob of sisters. It’s a very short novel, which is part of the problem. Tyler has a good reason for the family to be big but there’s little time to detail them all. I read this in my first flush of infatuation with Tyler (ca. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist) and was disappointed. I was better prepared for it this time and enjoyed it for what it is, a pretty good novel by a young writer with lots of potential and limited life experience. Tyler got better with seasoning but she was always a natural at novels, learning the craft early. If Morning Ever Comes is strictly for Tyler completists. It’s not her best by a fair shot but it’s not her worst either. Don’t ask me what her worst is. I like them all even if just a little.

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

The Tin Can Tree (1965)

Anne Tyler’s second novel was published when she was 23 or 24, so my expectations were not that high. It’s set in North Carolina, where she grew up and went to college before moving to Baltimore literally and figuratively. It features a family named Pike, a new experience for me after only Captain Christopher Pike on the original Star Trek series. Tyler is still obviously learning her craft, but her sense of character building is already there and not bad. She bravely takes on a story of a family who have lost a 6-year-old to an accidental death, a pretty good premise which she makes even better by noticing the child was not the favored one of the parents. It’s poignant on its own terms. Tyler kind of misfires by making the parents seem older than they probably are. The surviving older brother is not even 10 yet. Mr. and Mrs. Pike, so-called, are thus probably not even 40 but they feel like they are pushing 60. Some of that can be chalked up to the pain and grief of the loss, maybe. Mrs. Pike is practically catatonic, which feels like an exaggeration. The Pikes live in a peculiar building that also houses two other sets of tenants. They all share a porch and the building goes two stories, isolated in the country outside a small town. I had a hard time imagining it, let alone believing it. They are a bunch of quirky kooks, which is the most recognizably Tyler aspect of The Tin Can Tree. One set of tenants is a pair of older women, sisters or cousins. The other is a pair of brothers, one taking care of the other, who suffers from complications of anemia and is annoying. I thought the novel worked better than some of her other early ones—there’s a good deal of complexity to all these characters—but she’s still on the novel-writing learning curve here, as amazing as it is for a second novel by someone so young. I like the basic premise but I’m not sure Tyler had the lived experience yet to do it justice. A lot of things about The Tin Can Tree just feel made up. The families are fractured but, in the case of the brothers, they feel undeveloped even though they turn out to be an important (if late-arriving) plot point. Someone on Goodreads compared it to Steinbeck and that seems fair enough, although my edition has an interview with Tyler from many years later. She is critical of certain shortcomings in this novel but never mentions any influences. It’s kind of a rough one in many ways but completists may be relieved to find that overall it’s not bad.

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

French Braid (2022)

Anne Tyler’s latest may sound like typical fare—a multigenerational story of a Baltimore family—but it flat surprised me how good it is. If her work in the past 10 years has sparked up some, I think it still has not been up to the heights of her 20th-century work for quite some time. But French Braid reasserts her novelistic powers with a large-scale story told in small, telling scenes. My favorite part is that it’s not particularly nice—not so feel-good, except it felt good to read a really good Anne Tyler novel again. For one thing, she found a way to write around her difficulties with the contemporary world and especially its technology. After an opening salvo in the present day, the novel retreats all the way back to 1959, and brings the action forward one decade at a time. The ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s were arguably her heyday and she obviously feels more comfortable in those periods—even thrives in them, with sharp insight on feminism and families. The first generation we encounter is Mercy and Robin, an interclass couple who marry in 1940. They quickly have two girls, Alice and Lily, and much later a boy, David. Each of them, in turn, marry and have their own families. It does start to get a little hazy and confusing with the third generation. In fact, with the occupations of the youngest we are veering close to Tyler’s slightly Mr. Magoo view of present times. She is actually pretty good on the initial 2020 phase of the pandemic anyway. And frankly it doesn’t matter that much, because Mercy, Robin, Alice, Lily, and David are drawn so well and come to such vivid life. Nearing 80 as she wrote, Tyler can take the long view of life with considerable credibility. It’s a chief virtue here. The family is decidedly US middle-class but unpredictable and surprising, always in believable ways. They are typical only because all their heartaches and their joys too are unique and specific to them. Tyler even finds ways to lean into her usual repressed character types, more or less her signature, by drawing back from them a little instead of focusing on their extremes of withdrawn behavior. There are still extremes. There is a story about a cat I can sense is going to haunt me for a while. Lily’s fate made me insanely happy because it felt like just one of those redemption stories that happen to people. Mercy, the family matriarch, is probably the main character in this cast. She’s prickly and difficult to be easy with. She makes some strange decisions. On the internet, she’s the reason many people don’t like French Braid. She is unlikable in many ways, but she’s also heroic, and sounds the feminist note with a good deal of cool clarity. I started this novel with low expectations and by the halfway point had an idea how good it was. One of her best.

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

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.

Redhead by the Side of the Road (2020)

I had mixed feelings about this Anne Tyler novel. I enjoyed it but it's hard to miss that lots of the characters and themes are familiar: a middle-aged man locked into his routines and limited ambition, the eccentrics around him who are not as inhibited, his attempt to come to terms with himself, and, of course, Baltimore. There is a little bit here from The Accidental Tourist and a little bit from A Patchwork Planet. For better or worse, there's a definite sense in the basic elements of a generic Anne Tyler. Mostly I enjoyed it. It had more substance than some of her others in this century. In fact, a Kirkus review found it "suffused with feeling and very moving." A review on Goodreads was closer to my reaction. The reviewer, Marchpane, liked it in spite of misgivings about a number of weak points. She notes the novel is affecting but mentions Tyler is 78 now and having a hard time hiding her age in some ways. For example, Micah Mortimer, the main character here, runs a solo business as a computer handyman, but Marchpane notes that his "clients come to him with tech problems from the 1990s.... Meanwhile all the characters seem like they are from several decades earlier." That's all true although I actually liked the thread about Micah's work, partly because it was a route that fleetingly appeared viable for me circa 2007. And I want to say, contra Marchpane, that some of these problems are more like from the 2000s, Wi-Fi and such, but I take the point and it makes me worry a little about my own antiquating views of things. But all that said, everyone seems to end up liking Redhead by the Side of the Road and I did too. It's quite short—Marchpane also argues it should have been a shorter story or a longer novel and that might be right too. That led me to notice on Wikipedia that Tyler has actually published a number of short stories, which have never been collected. That might be a project for someone—some of them are from her best years and in venues like The New Yorker. I didn't find Redhead by the Side of the Road to be as good as 2016's Vinegar Girl (which is her best of the past decade, I think) but it's a little better than 2018's Clock Dance.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Clock Winder (1972)

I want to call Anne Tyler's fourth novel a gothic. There's an unkempt mansion, deaths and suicide, mental illness, and generally some sharp edges. It's her first to use Baltimore as a key setting, though it's not the only setting here. Tyler's college town of Raleigh, North Carolina, is important too. It might be the first actual Anne Tyler novel, the end of a long four-novel formative period—she sounds a little embarrassed by the early ones now. The Clock Winder is uneven and has some gaps arguably, but I like the grotesque Emerson family. The novel's main character is Elizabeth, the handyman to whom the Emersons offer a home. She is competent where they are not, and a certain type of hippie lost soul. The family matriarch, Mrs. Emerson, is the other important character here, a woman capable of deep commitment to her shallowness. She can't understand why her seven children have turned out the way they have (eight if you count an early death). As the novel begins Mrs. Emerson has recently become a widow. Elizabeth walks by and offers to help her move some furniture she is struggling with, and just like that, Anne Tyler style, they fall together. Elizabeth moves in as the house handyman and though she is disaffected and remote she soon enough bears emotional responsibility for these oddballs. In a way I like these earlier grotesques from Tyler, before she learned to sand off some of the edges for warmer, more quirky characters. I like how you can see her feeling her way toward that even as her sense of the world is more stark. Some of the Emersons are better than others, and the worst can be very bad, positively dangerous. They're not really such harmless kooks—I like that. I like Elizabeth a lot too, the daughter of a Baptist preacher and a shallow wife. Elizabeth is a reflexive truth seeker. She connects and disconnects very easily. She's super-competent in a low-key way in the context of the Emersons, but believes she is otherwise a perennial screw-up, awkwardly wrecking everything she touches. The feeling of competence the Emersons give her is what attracts Elizabeth to them. I can understand calling The Clock Winder flawed, but I also thought it was interesting and unpredictable all the way through. Tyler is obviously a good storyteller before she is anything else. And I like her own fondness for grotesques, who try her patience as much as they charm her. They are an essential part of life to her.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Clock Dance (2018)

I had some problems with this Anne Tyler novel but on balance liked it quite a bit, as much as anything she's written this century short of her last, Vinegar Girl. Willa is 61. Her life is amply sketched out in the first half, as she finds herself dispatched on an unlikely errand in Baltimore. She lives in Arizona with her semiretired second husband, who enjoys golf and conference calls, but most of the present-day events take place in Baltimore, as usual. Willa's husband is not around for much of it, except in glowering moments punctuating the action. Most of the men in Willa's life—her two husbands and her two sons—are unpleasant, good examples of how Tyler's work can be anything but gentle and quirky, even if her favorite characters tend to be so. The Baltimore neighborhood where Willa lands is full of them, and they are wonderful. But watching Willa come to terms with herself and her life, or start to, is the heart of the story, and it is full of sharp edges. All her loved ones and some of her new friends can be astonishingly callous. These excesses we are trained to forgive, but they hurt (Willa herself is almost pathological about seeking forgiveness, even when she's done nothing wrong). Tyler is here to tell us how they hurt. In a way, Clock Dance is perfectly typical of her—Baltimore, quirky folks, a lovable dog, etc.—but she's really got a potent grasp of Willa's ongoing existential crisis, which is many ways is all of ours. The novel is front-loaded with backstory, which slows the first half, though Tyler's writing is insanely warm and engaging as always. The second half is kind of a miracle of a balancing act, insisting on its unlikely premise and making it work. Much of the very real tension is about how long Willa (not Tyler) can keep things going. Not that long, it turns out—less than three weeks. At which point Tyler herself finally seems to flag, with an ending that leaves us pitched over the edge of momentum. It's a classic literary dodge, ambiguous and swift—the lady or the tiger, which do you choose? The fact that I want so badly to know more is testament to Tyler's skill, which I experienced as keen pleasure being in the company of Willa. She's puzzling, unusual, interesting. I want badly to see that next scene. Today I count that as one of my problems with the novel. Maybe down the line I'll appreciate Tyler's wisdom there too.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Celestial Navigation (1974)

I liked Anne Tyler's fifth novel, full of all the usual stuff—Baltimore, a repressed man hero, a nurturing extrovert woman for his partner. It's a little experimental in form but solidly constructed. The experimental part is that each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, sometimes first-person, sometimes third-person. Our repressed man hero, Jeremy Pauling, lives in a rooming house his mother operated, taking it over after she dies at the start of the novel. He really is an extreme case, nearly autistic in his affect, much more damaged than the charming eccentrics Tyler would produce later (damaged as they may be). Jeremy's girlfriend Mary moves into his place on the rebound from a rebound relationship following a divorce. She's big and loud and competent and gives birth to six kids in the space of this novel. Jeremy is the father of the last five, but he's such an abstracted figure to them they all call him by his name rather than Dad or even Daddy. Conveniently enough, he's able to make a living as a fine artist—a gallery owner takes him under his wing and Jeremy's work catches on. Most of the pleasure in this is Tyler's language and her usual sharp eye and ear. Small details unexpectedly swim off the page and hit hard. I had my usual trouble always believing the easy way Tyler characters survive and fall together. Her faith in love and relationships can be romantic verging on sentimental. Yet something about the story of Jeremy and Mary tugs hard. Notably, I did not expect it to end the way it did. In fact, the zigging and zagging of the plot is often unexpected, yet never outlandish. Part of this is achieved by her narrative strategy. By shifting the points of view steadily, large events in the story often happen offstage. The story may lurch a little with each new chapter, but the novel is effective and moves with confidence. There's a quick tempo and a steady, grabby momentum. I've been reading my way through the novels from the first half of Tyler's career backward, and it's interesting to see some of the work losing focus in a way. Jeremy is not as sharp as Macon Leary and Mary is not as sharp as Muriel Pritchett, but they are certain foundations for those characters. And Celestial Navigation bears interest on its own merits as definitely one of the good ones.

In case it's not at the library.

Searching for Caleb (1975)

Anne Tyler's sixth novel tells the story of a very familiar family, though her eye and ear have not yet entirely reached the fine tuning to come. The Pecks are from Baltimore, of course, and at the center of the novel (if not the family) is a married couple of first cousins: Justine, a fortune teller, and Duncan, a ne'er-do-well, though obviously gifted, who has gone out of his way to reject the family. He has moved away from Baltimore, and continued moving his family every two or three years, though never far from Baltimore. Justine and Duncan have a 17-year-old daughter and also a grandfather who lives with them. The grandfather is the one searching for Caleb, who is his brother and the true black sheep of the family. Caleb disappeared in 1912 and has never been heard from since. The story takes place in the summer of 1973. Again, nothing is quite as sharp and distinct as Tyler's characters would become, but many of her best aspects are already apparent. The Pecks are a certain familiar type of alienated clan nonetheless clinging to one another. The chief tension is the paradox of rejecting family without rejecting oneself. Duncan and Caleb are working through how it doesn't really work, or what the trade-offs are. The paradox is that self-knowledge of family weaknesses does not get rid of them in you. One person's self-knowledge is another's benighted existence—there's not much difference. Justine is the one character who seems most capable of balancing the competing forces, but it's not clear even she is doing well at it. Which also depends some on the reader's point of view. I had a hard time taking Justine seriously as a fortune teller—much like most of the Peck family, in fact—yet the narrator's view is ambiguous. We might be intended to believe in her psychic powers, though the tone is generally more along the lines of entertainment than insights. She is a kooky sideshow at church bazaars, for example, and though her gift is on the order of seeing the future there aren't many convincing examples of it, if any. Tyler would do much better elsewhere with all the themes found here. If you're on a jag, go ahead and throw this one on the pile too. Otherwise, never mind.

In case it's not at the library.

Vinegar Girl (2016)

This is the first I've heard of the Hogarth Shakespeare series, published by Penguin Random House under the Hogarth Press imprint, which was originally founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf. The idea for the series is to let contemporary novelists give their fictional takes on Shakespeare plays. Eight books total, launched in October 2015, and they are still rolling out. Others feature Margaret Atwood riffing on The Tempest and Jeanette Winterson on The Winter's Tale. Anne Tyler here takes on The Taming of the Shrew. There's actually a compatibility between the two I hadn't anticipated. Not that I know the Shakespeare that well, but it's not hard to see his narrative bones constituting a handy frame on which Tyler can drape her modern-day chatterboxes. I think Petruchio's personality may have shifted some in the Russian immigrant Pyotr, but Kate is a pretty straight translation: an independent-minded woman caught in various social snares, and so perpetually aggrieved—"the shrew." It feels like Tyler is having a lot of fun with this and enjoying herself more than she has in a while, and that's infectious. Already it's one of her funniest—Shakespeare gets credit too, as they are usually his situations, notwithstanding that it takes place in Baltimore and involves elderly people incapable of mastering today's technology. The love affair—or "like affair" might be the better term for once—between Pyotr and Kate is the heartbeat of the whole thing, advancing from awkward arranged marriage to a satisfying happy ending that proceeds directly from the characters of the principals, who are equally likable, together or apart. The 29-year-old Kate is a perfect image of women in the 21st century and the choices they face. Some of the changes in her relationship with Pyotr feel like they come too fast. But they are never inexplicable, often quite to be expected, and it doesn't hurt to know the action is backstopped by the immortal bard himself. Whatever the causes, Tyler feels more liberated to work and indulge her own strengths, the usual vexing and comical issues of intimate family interdependencies, with plenty of sweet sweet pathos on the side. The rumors surrounding her last novel, that it was her last and now she would retire, appear to be overstated. I don't want to be greedy or anything, but here's hoping there's a little more where this came from.

In case it's not at the library.

A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

There aren't many surprises in this Anne Tyler novel, but somehow I connected with it more than other recent novels by her. It's familiar stuff: the setting in Baltimore, the focus on a fractured and fractious family, and Tyler's usual eye and ear for the telling detail of human relationships, one of her great strengths. A Spool of Blue Thread covers four generations of the Whitshank family. The star is Abby, the Tyler woman who holds together a family by the strength of her love and will. And there's plenty of quirk to go around as usual—her four children and their children are still more typical Tyler creations: a ne'er-do-well son, a child adopted under strange circumstances, two types of sisters. Most of the novel follows events in the here and now as Abby and her husband Red enter their 70s with worrisome failings. In the last third, Tyler pushes the action back in time to the late '50s, when Abby and Red began their relationship, and then even further back, to the original family scions, Junior and Linnie Mae, when the family homestead was originally built in the 1930s. The story of their lives and courtship is actually blunt and a little shocking. Linnie Mae seduced Junior (as the narrative goes) when she was 13 and Junior was 26. The story has its comical elements yet Tyler writing in 2015 knows we can't take a 13-year-old girl's sexual agency at face value. You can say it's the times and place—both Junior and Linnie Mae are also Southerners—but we know better, which undergirds their story with tension and anxiety, and thus the story of the whole family. I said Abby was the star, but her black sheep elder son Denny is another main player here, and another typical Tyler figure, a bit like Barnaby Gaitlin from A Patchwork Planet and a little like a Jonathan Franzen character. I see myself in them too. Like Denny, I'm a little amazed by people who stay in one place and/or in regular touch across a lifetime. I'm amazed at some of the things these people accomplish—annual weeklong jaunts to "the beach," for example. Really, every year? How do you do that? Denny is the guy, all tripped up in his own problems, who can only make it every five or six years, which all the others find ridiculous. I enjoyed this one a lot. It's full of stuff like that, like all the best Tyler.

In case it's not at the library.

Earthly Possessions (1977)

Here's an earlier Anne Tyler novel—working my way back now, this is her seventh overall—and it comes with a lot of familiar features: a Baltimore setting, a dysfunctional family of siblings, a marriage on the rocks, a compulsively chatty woman as the main character, and a road trip with overtones of desperation. Some awkwardness yet: one prong of the narration is set in motion by the unlikely circumstance of our hero, Charlotte Emory, taken hostage in a botched bank robbery. It's the ever gentle Tyler, and before long the crime is all good, no harm no foul. Charlotte and the bank robber sail off down the road on quixotic errands. Charlotte had been thinking of leaving her husband anyway, and Charlotte's ruminations on how she has come to such a pass—sailing off down the road with a bank robber, that is, and leaving her husband behind—occupy the other main prong of the story. Charlotte recalls her life, her family of origin, her husband, her children, I think a pet was involved in there too. You would expect her life to be passing in front of her in a hostage situation, but it's not like that. She's just talking it out on a car ride. It's good stuff, the meat and grist of a lifetime, shot down the barrel of time. But the details can feel overplayed or even made-up. One thread about someone's wife running off with her father-in-law seemed a bridge too far and/or accepted all too equably, an artifact of those post-'60s pre-Reagan times, perhaps. Then again, this is a hostage situation following a bank robbery that went bad. Or perhaps I'm judgmental. For the most part, Earthly Possessions is what Anne Tyler got to be very good at: the little ways people intrude on one another, disappoint one another, offer redemption to one another. There was nobody I liked a whole lot in it, but I was pretty much on board for the whole thing, letting suspension of disbelief take care of the rest. Her characters usually have charms even when they are annoying. I know I like it more than the one that came next, Morgan's Passing, but otherwise I don't think it's really up to her second-half work either. I can see better how she developed and settled into the wonderful Baltimore of her imagination, because here the setting feels much more incidental. She's not as sharp as she would get in her observations, but she is always a good student of people. I am flailing toward quantifying: it's not exactly a B or three stars of five (or two-and-a-half of four). But a rating of 5 on a scale of 1 to 10 seems to say so much so quickly.

In case it's not at the library.

Morgan's Passing (1980)

I'm not sure it's possible to say how disappointing I found this. Anne Tyler's eighth novel and the last before my single favorite (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, though a few others that came after are nearly as good) seemed crazy weak to me. The eccentric middle-aged man at the center of it is too painfully (and unbelievably) cute, dressing up in wacky costumes (cowboy, stage magician, riverboat gambler, frontiersman, soldier) and putting his wacky self in the faces of conventional others. He's not malicious but rather gentle and kindly, and of course wiser than Solomon. I had two more problems—a self-conscious and awkward kinkiness, and most of the narrative arcs, especially the main one. I just couldn't believe most of these people existed in any world I know. Little that they did made sense. Impersonating a doctor and delivering a child and then stalking the couple to become part of their lives are generally more chilling acts to me than as related here, where it's just sort of raffish. I reacted so badly I almost want to scurry back and check the ones I know I like. Have I lost my taste for Tyler? After all, the ones I like are also full of affable kooks, often making poor decisions. But they seemed more deeply plunged into real mysteries of the human heart, where this seems to be a lot of posturing guesswork. Part of this may be the decision to tell it from a man's point of view, which also hampered A Patchwork Planet, though I think generally that is a much better novel. I have no sense of who this Morgan Gower is. I don't think I've met anyone remotely like him. Father of seven girls but willfully irresponsible in a way that reportedly annoys people, but the people seem more indulgent and vaguely charmed. I didn't like him but I think we are meant to. Well, I'm not sure. And I'm even less sure Tyler knew herself. Flailing to make sense of my bad reaction, I see reviewers I think I trust (John Leonard, James Wolcott) liking it for the reasons I like most of the other Tyler novels: her sharp eye for the environments of her characters, and her even sharper ear for the ways they fail to communicate. I have been really affected by the eccentric motley in her novels and the heartbreaking ways they cope and attempt to connect and find satisfaction in their lives. But Morgan's Passing left me cold.

In case it's not at the library.

The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)

I found Anne Tyler's most recent novel to be surprisingly sad in many ways I'm not sure are so good, though by the same token I must acknowledge the profound effect it had on my mood. For one thing, it felt a bit like a retread of many ideas from perhaps her most successful novel, The Accidental Tourist. They are both built around the usual given, a quirky Baltimore slightly underclass family, but also in both the family is involved in a publishing business and successful series of books. From there the details diverge some: it is a vanity house in The Beginner's Goodbye, for example, as opposed to the slightly more legitimate travel guides of Accidental Tourist. It seemed hard to believe the size and nature of the "Beginner's" series (a kind of larky variation on "for Dummies" books), given the size of the staff combined with the size of the series implied by all the many different titles and subject areas mentioned, although it's possible that's the way things can go in vanity publishing ventures. The Accidental Tourist may have similar problems, but I never noticed. There is even a sister who at long last finds happiness. The story at hand in The Beginner's Goodbye concerns the brother, Aaron, who is younger, and recently widowed by the freak accident of a tree falling on their house. It is the first year or two after his wife's death and Aaron has begun to see her occasionally, back from the dead somehow, even exchanging some words with her sometimes, before she disappears. It should be the most unbelievable part of the book but instead it is the most convincing. That, in turn, lays a firm foundation for revelations about the relationship that contradict most of our initial assumptions. The relationship between Aaron and his dead wife Dorothy is the best part, flickering in and out with Dorothy herself. Then, after she is gone for good, a happy ending is made to this short novel. It's not very believable, it feels tacked-on and almost like a formal gesture of politeness. As if Tyler is asking forgiveness for going so deeply into the pain of losing what one had conceived was a lifetime partner, who turns out by circumstance to be anything but. Speak no ill of the dead, perhaps? It left me feeling foul.

In case it's not at the library.

Noah's Compass (2010)

There's part of me that suspects Liam Pennywell, the protagonist in Anne Tyler's most recent novel (and her 18th overall, with a 19th scheduled for arrival this spring), is the closest approximation we may have to Tyler herself. The sadness at the core of Pennywell's life is occupied so expertly and with such gentle, telling detail, even a little more, I think, than we usually get from her. And even though he is a man. And even though he comes from the Macon Leary side of Tyler's typical gene pool. It ultimately makes sense to me that Tyler would be closer to Leary anyway than to Murial Pritchett—she is a private, reclusive writer who seems a natural for a dependence on routine. I know I could be reading too much into things I don't know anything about, but her novels since the death of her husband in the late '90s feel haunted to me by him, or by loss, in one way or another—the bitter rancor that drives Back When We Were Grownups, the sweeping perspective of a lifetime on a long-term marriage in The Amateur Marriage, and of course the Iranian characters in Digging to America. Here it feels like the sadness that occurs before acceptance—acceptance not only of the traumatizing event but of all the changes and loss it has inevitably brought. Liam Pennywell arrives at his early 60s virtually without a livelihood—a one-time graduate student in philosophy, his resume shows the decline of his fortunes, from his graduate studies to teaching high school to teaching 5th grade to, finally, a job in a preschool facility. This is not to say that his work has become less important—I can think of few things less important than graduate school philosophy—but certainly it's the way most will see it, and of that, certainly, Pennywell is all too aware. There's a last chance at love for him here too, after two failed marriages, one that ended in his wife's suicide and the other in divorce, which produced three daughters, one rather late in life. As always, the story is filled with the quirky life and charming delights that Tyler is so capable of delivering. But it's bittersweet, with decided emphasis on the first word in that compound, and utterly convincing for a man in Pennywell's position and at his time in life. Tyler is closing in on age 70 now and she does seem to have more to tell us all the time.

In case it's not at the library.

Digging to America (2006)

On balance this is a pretty good one, with an interesting combination of Anne Tyler's by-the-numbers themes and a whole new wrinkle that makes sense in terms of her biography. By-the-numbers first: the familiar collision and results ensue between a fussy controlling person and a more freewheeling vibrant disorganized personality is well-known territory. Here the usual gender roles are switched (not for the first time either, as in A Patchwork Planet): the controlling person is Maryam Yazdu, an Iranian immigrant, and Dave Dickinson, a Baltimore native and recent widow, is the one who embraces life willy-nilly yet always with exuberance. What I thought was particularly interesting and fresh here is Tyler's takes on immigration experiences, as the Yazdus and their clan all have significant roots in Iran. That's a fascinating choice of itself; it makes sense that Tyler's husband (who died in the late '90s) was himself Iranian-American, and first or second generation at that, a reasonably recent transplant. It makes sense all kinds of ways—both because she (Tyler) lived a lifetime with exposure to the customs and ways of Iranian immigrants, and also as a solace to remember her husband and her life with him. It's a huge twist compared to other Tyler but there's also no mistaking it for anything but. The usual heartaches are all over it, the sad and lonely people failing to connect even as they yearn on their deepest levels for exactly that. The characters are vivid and feel like people I've known. A small point: Something about the title seems off to me. It's connected in the book to the way children all talk about digging holes to China—I know I did it myself, and it feels universal—with even a funny child-like cast to it, and in an interview Tyler talks about how she intends it almost inversely, as digging through facades that people erect for themselves, made doubly difficult for immigrants with the additional cultural (and political, she might have added) overlays. Still, something about the title doesn't work for me. Paradoxically, it reminds me both of an Albert Brooks movie and of deadly earnest documentaries, which was a little distracting. This is good enough that it deserves an audience with nothing standing in its way.

In case it's not at the library.

The Amateur Marriage (2004)

If I were inclined in any way towards rankings and making lists (and who's to say I'm not?) I'd put this fairly high among Anne Tyler's novels, after only Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Saint Maybe. It's interesting to watch Tyler working through her various tried and true themes—in the one just before this, Back When We Were Grownups, she went perhaps as far as she's gone in making her loose, freewheeling woman the unblemished hero, and the taciturn, repressed man the rejected object of scorn. Here she very nearly goes to the other extreme: Pauline is familiar as the wacky, uninhibited center of a Baltimore family's gravity, but there's an unpleasant tincture of rage to this round, even as her long-suffering husband Michael is not nearly as suffocating—suffocating, yes, but not nearly as much so—as Tyler's familiar Leary types. In fact, this time around the uninhibited freewheeler is very nearly as suffocating in her own way, as the type generally is. Speaking as more of a Leary myself, it's nice to see Tyler grasping the point. Or maybe I only missed her grasp of it before. There is a tremendous amount of sadness to this story of a long-term marriage that ultimately fails, told from beginning to well past the end. The story of the oldest daughter Lindy, who simply vanishes for nearly 30 years, is particularly shocking, and wrenching. Pauline dies before they ever are reunited, and the reunion itself is shrewdly enough mostly an anticlimax. Even though the mystery of Lindy is solved, it lingers on. This seems to me absolutely true to life, and does nothing to dispel the sadness. In fact, as much as I like the happy ending to Saint Maybe, I think I like the sour ending here even a little more. Again the characters are nicely drawn and as always feel effortlessly distinct and real, like people you've known all your life. The narrative strategy is a good one and nicely executed, dipping into the lives of Pauline and Michael once or twice a decade across their long marriage and its aftermath, moving with a sure hand as its story just enlarges and enlarges. In many ways it's the story of America from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, but never feels pushy about the point. Just another poignant visit with more folks that Anne Tyler knows.

In case it's not at the library.

Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

For anyone who's read much of Anne Tyler there are a number of non-surprises here: the main character, Rebecca Holmes Davitch, is loving, sensitive, nurturing, humorous, expansive, a middle-aged woman who is taken for granted by her family, who maintains a continual air of upbeat enthusiasm and forced gaiety, and who doesn't quite understand how she ended up where she is. Surrounding her are any number of halfway lost ne'er-do-wells, vaguely unpleasant emotional leeches, and self-centered nincompoops who feed casually on her energy (among them her 87-year-old mother). It's arguable that she's happier than she knows, means more to the people in her life than she knows, is richer than George Bailey, etc., etc. But that's at best an even-money bet, I think. The surprise for me in this one was the hard rejection of the typical Tyler fussy person, who is perhaps best personified across her oeuvre by the Leary family in The Accidental Tourist. In this case it's Will Allenby, the boyfriend of Rebecca's youth that she threw over on the way to her present life, which shortly left her a widow responsible for four daughters, only one of them her own—not to mention emotionally responsible for a ragbag collection of characters from her deceased husband's extended family. Rebecca reaches out to Allenby, finding herself in a place where she rues the loss of a relationship that in memory was safe and warm and comfortable. But Allenby, as a tenured academic and aging divorced man, with a daughter with whom he cannot connect, has remarkably few charms. He is like the worst of the Learys with nothing to offset it, disconnected from all around him and deeply delusional about himself and his capabilities, which include at least one frightening episode of losing control and more generally a pathological inability to love and accept love. I had some personal identification with him in spite of all that, and thus his categorical rejection by Rebecca came almost as a shock. I didn't see how it could work out, but Tyler is usually more generous about the way she approaches these things and Rebecca was almost brutal with him. And then Tyler reveals how deeply depressed she actually is, what a blow the loss of her husband decades earlier had been, and how easily the callous disregard of her adopted family can leave her feeling adrift and lost. In many ways this seemed to me a notably depressing novel, rather unusual on the whole for Tyler. It does end on a note of cautious optimism, and I'm pretty sure, reading the tea leaves of interviews with her, that she sees the resolution as much closer to feel-good than I do. It left me feeling, in its immediate glow, a bit gloomy on the whole.

In case it's not at the library.

A Patchwork Planet (1998)

This is one by Anne Tyler that seemed to me not so easy to get a bead on. On the one hand it's as compulsively readable as anything by her; I have now found myself twice rip-roaring through it in short order. Its first-person story of Barnaby Gaitlin the poor little rich boy and black sheep of a wealthy family of Baltimore philanthropists has all the usual Tyler hallmarks: quirky lovable characters who bring the pathos, a jumble of amiable incident, and a moderately surprise twist in its ending that satisfies more than not. Gaitlin has rejected his wealthy family nearly as much as they have rejected him, though all remain enmeshed with one another. After some serious problems as a teen, including a late graduation from high school and legal troubles involving burglary charges, he has spent all of his adult life working for Rent-a-Back, which provides manual labor services to the elderly. Gaitlin turns 30 as the novel begins. Divorced from a brief marriage, he has a 9-year-old daughter who lives with her mother and stepfather in Philadelphia. Gaitlin is a bit of a Holden Caulfield, reflexively rejecting anything he identifies as phony. He rents the basement of a home from a family with whom he must share a bathroom. The patriarchal side of his family believes that angels traditionally visit them at portentous points in their lives to deliver fateful messages. Gaitlin believes he may have found his angel in the person of Sophie, who he meets on a train ride between Baltimore and Philadelphia after watching her carry through on a good deed on an earlier train ride. But when they end up involved, Gaitlin is no longer as sure about that. Taken altogether, A Patchwork Planet notably has its oddities, perhaps none greater than Tyler's decision to tell the story first-person by Gaitlin. Over the duration of the novel he seemed to me less and less believable as a man, and indeed begins to come off like one of those Woody Allen characters—philosopher or TV comedy writer or documentary filmmaker—who only sounds like Woody Allen. Gaitlin sounds more and more like the typical garrulous, overfeeling Tyler female with an overlay of pro forma male characteristics, such as a certain degree of handiness with tools. Some of Gaitlin's plaintive declarations and assertions at points started to remind me of Jack Handey Deep Thoughts shtick ("If you go parachuting, and your parachute doesn’t open, and you friends are all watching you fall, I think a funny gag would be to pretend you were swimming"), which brought things dangerously close to capsizing under their own weight at various points. Yet this is also one of Tyler's more tightly constructed and symmetrical plots as well and certainly worth it for any fan.

In case it's not at the library.

Ladder of Years (1995)

This one seemed to me something of a disappointment, I think mostly because I've come to have such high expectations of Anne Tyler. It starts out well, and continues well, but the resolution doesn't seem to me to work. Probably there's no resolution that could, all things considered, but Tyler is good enough that maybe I have just come to expect miracles. The story is about Delia Grinstead, a Baltimore housewife of 40 who feels taken for granted by her family (because she is). On the family's annual summer trek to the seashore she goes off on her own for a walk in her beach robe and sandals and suddenly decides to keep walking. She ends up in a small town inland where, almost as if she is sleepwalking, she begins to cobble together a new life for herself—finds a room, clothes, a job, just keeps on staying there, almost in spite of herself, as the summer ends and autumn and winter arrive. Gradually her whereabouts become known to her family but it's some time before anyone shows up, and then there's less any consideration for why she might be doing what she's doing and more an attitude of wondering if she plans to stop being crazy. In the meanwhile, she is building a life there, afforded the opportunity to try on or emphasize new and different aspects of her personality. For example, she starts out as a starchy, even severe, secretary at a law firm where she is considered ultra efficient. Inevitably, because she is a typical Tyler character who simply loves people and can't help connecting with them, she begins to build a set of friends and acquaintances who rely on her and on whom she relies too—"support network," is the term of art. In the process, she demonstrates to herself, and of course to readers, just how competent and well put together she actually is, in case we had any doubts. Gradually she falls in with a single father and his son and the potential for deeper connections grows to be distinctly more than a possibility. At that point, like Huck Finn and Jim crossing into the slave territory, the directions in which the story can go are alarmingly closed down. It's hard to know what's better or worse for Delia, shucking everything off willy-nilly from an old life and moving on, trying to make peace somehow with that damaged old life, or simply withdrawing into isolation. Tyler makes her choice—she would probably argue that Delia makes her choice—because a choice must be made. Until then, it's Tyler the way we know and love her, full of characters as strange as they are real, with all their charming, maddening warts and foibles.

In case it's not at the library.