Back When We Were Grownups Anne Tyler Chatto & Windus, 274pp, £15.99 ISBN 070117286X

Back When We Were Grownups begins with a disastrous family picnic and ends with an uncomfortable 100th birthday party. Both professionally and privately, the world of Rebecca Davitch, a 53-year-old widow and grandmother, revolves around parties - to celebrate babies, engagements and even, simply, Thursdays. A modern-day Mrs Ramsay or Dalloway, she is forever chivvying her recalcitrant clan or guests together. But unlike Woolf's heroines, her dignity has been eroded by years of "babbling" to keep the peace. She was once so composed and serious. Somewhere along the way, she reflects in the opening line, "she had turned into the wrong person".

Anne Tyler's latest novel retraces Rebecca's story to the point at which it changed direction, and offers her the chance to pick up the "true real life" she left when she met her husband. Joe Davitch mistook her for a light-hearted party girl, and thus her new identity was forged. She became a force of "unrelenting jollity" in a family predisposed to despondency. Joe was killed in a car crash (there are dark hints of suicide) and Rebecca was left in charge of three difficult stepdaughters as well as a daughter of her own, a couple of dependent elderly relatives, a dilapidated town house and a struggling business organising parties. It's no wonder she occasionally feels put upon.

Rebecca's situation, a middle-aged woman whose personality has been hijacked by her family (even her name is worn down to "Beck"), might seem played out. But her unfortunate bag-lady clothes, overwhelming kindness and sense of her own ridiculousness (she feels too big, too loud, too much) make her both painfully original and recognisable.

Like many of Tyler's novels, the plot in brief can sound slight and sentimental. The story follows an unremarkable series of "what ifs?" and "might-have-beens". Beck wonders about the quiet, studious boy to whom she had once "been engaged to be engaged". Eventually, she plucks up the courage to track down this childhood sweetheart, now a rather stuffy professor, and an authentically awkward romance develops.

It is the detail with which Tyler documents the quarrelsome ramifications of modern family life that distinguishes her fiction. There is nothing flashy or fashionable about her writing. Set, as usual, on the nutmeg-scented streets of Baltimore, this account of a muted mid-life crisis is shaped by her familiar themes of grief, endurance and compromise.

Beck's grown-up stepdaughters, Biddy, Patch and NoNo, and her daughter, Min Foo (not oriental, just another silly nickname), are childishly selfish, although redeemed by moments of uncharacteristic insight. As a funny, sympathetic portrait of the extended middle-class stepfamily, the novel triumphs - even Beck has difficulty keeping track of her tangled family tree. Few writers capture children and old people with such affectionate awareness.

In contrast to the messiness of the subject matter, Tyler's narrative is effortlessly tidy, her prose as clean and sharp as ever. Her talent for domestic comedy might suggest a largely female readership, but in fact she has a dedicated male following, including the novelists Nick Hornby and Roddy Doyle. John Updike, a huge Tyler fan, once remarked that he could find only one weakness in her fiction - "a tendency to leave the reader just where she found him", and it is true that Grownups returns nearly full circle. But a single tender voice, supporting Beck throughout yet ignored amid the noisy Davitch rabble, is finally heard. A gentle love story unfolds almost unnoticed. To read Anne Tyler means to listen very carefully.

Lisa Allardice is deputy books and arts editor of the NS

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