Books
Lost innocence. Anne Tyler is as polished as ever, but haven't we been here before? By Lisa Allardice
Published 19 January 2004
The Amateur Marriage
Anne Tyler Chatto & Windus, 306pp, £16.99
ISBN 0701177349
Anne Tyler's 16th novel is a myopic portrait of a disastrously mismatched marriage. Although it spans exactly 60 years, from the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to its anniversary in 2001, history and the external world are almost entirely obscured by domestic detail. It might be described as a novel of non-events and failures to act; even the most significant occasions (births and deaths) take place off-stage.
Tyler is preoccupied with paths taken and, in particular, paths not taken. In 1941, Michael Anton's fate is sealed when Pauline, a pretty blonde "with a natural kind of joyousness", walks into his mother's grocery. "He's a goner," those around to witness it conclude. Caught up in the excitement of the day and eager to impress this attractive stranger, Michael, who is a bit of a mother's boy, impulsively and uncharacteristically enlists. He never makes it to war, but is injured in training (an unromantic wound to the backside) and sent home. Just as impulsively, he asks Pauline to marry him and they live unhappily ever after. "They were such a perfect couple. They were taking their very first steps on the amazing journey of marriage, and wonderful adventures were about to unfold in front of them." Well, not quite. These are the good old days, when people really did repent at leisure.
They embark on their life of domestic misery, with Michael's mother, in the cramped apartment above the grocery in the Polish district of East Baltimore - and the familiar interior landscape of nearly all Tyler's fiction, where the houses "were too small, too close together". Pauline persuades him to move with their young children to Elmsview Acres, a modern development in Baltimore County where "it was so green and safe and peaceful". But it is here that the family really begins to fall apart. When she is 17, their eldest daughter, Lindy, disappears. Bored with her family's prim provincial life and inspired by her heroes Jack Kerouac and Albert Camus, she joins the hippie trail to San Francisco. They next hear of her eight years later; she has "freaked out" and entered a retreat, leaving behind a three-year-old boy called Pagan.
All the Tyler trademarks are here: the themes of guilt, repression and misunderstanding; the genteel Baltimore setting; and the painful absence at the novel's centre. The home in Tyler's fiction is at once a place of safety and imprisonment: as Lindy says many years later, "their family used to remind her of an animal caught in a trap". It both defines and erodes characters' true selves. From Michael setting off to war at the very beginning, the novel enacts a series of increasingly irrevocable departures - the only deliberate action any of the characters take.
Tyler seems to subscribe to an old- fashioned version of the Mars and Venus school of relations between the sexes. Her men are invariably stuffy, fastidious bores, her women flighty, emotional neurotics. Michael likes to make love on a Saturday night, and always in the same way; he is the kind of man "who insists on putting money in the parking meter even when he finds that someone else has left enough minutes on it". Who can blame poor Pauline for getting a little tetchy? Pauline is a pain, too. Weepy and needy, she can't drive down the road without getting lost or knocking someone over. But Tyler can make even the most infuriating characters seem at once comic and sympathetic, without ever patronising them. She captures the messy contradictoriness of human affections.
Almost like artfully connected short stories, the narrative is told from the perspective of each of the family members, with the significant exceptions of Lindy and Pagan, perhaps the most intriguing of this stodgy brood. But this is above all a portrait of a marriage, and it is Michael and Pauline whom we come to know with an almost unseemly intimacy. The passing years are recorded only by characters growing older, anniversaries and changing fashions. Nothing that does not directly affect the family is given more than a glancing mention: "At one point during the news (Vietnam and more Vietnam) Michael fell asleep." But there is a broader vision here: one of lost innocence, a world of dwindling communities and a declining sense of personal responsibility.
For the most part, those readers who find Tyler's fiction parochial and dull will feel confirmed in their view by this novel. Yet we do not read her work for excitement or a reflection of the world at large, but to understand better the people who inhabit it. Above all we read her for the effortless grace of her writing. Enjoying Tyler is like indulging in a guilty pleasure. The end is shamelessly sentimental, even for Tyler, but the earlier revelations are shocking in their tragic banality.
It is remarkable that we should care about these hopelessly dreary characters at all. But we do.
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