Anne Tyler has built a remarkably successful and steady career across almost six decades without having to adapt too much the narrative strategies that eventually produced her literary breakthrough in the early 1980s. If she’s had a late flowering (her novel A Spool of Blue Thread was shortlisted for the Booker in 2015—more than 30 years after her first Pulitzer nomination), it wasn’t, like Philip Roth in the 1990s, because she changed stride. On the BBC recently, she said: “I always say when I’m starting a book, ‘This one’s gonna be different.’ About halfway through, I say, ‘Oh, darn, it’s the same book over again.’” She writes about family life and the way you have to shape your personality to live with other people. These things change with the times but they don’t lose their importance. Her worldview may be reliably, even comfortably, old fashioned but it is still perfectly capable of processing new information.
Baltimore, where Tyler lives and where most of her stories are set, serves in her fiction as a kind of generic all-American town where, as she wrote in her 1982 masterpiece Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the houses are “dark and deep and secretive.” But it’s also a specific hybrid—on the border between north and south, with a tradition both of moneyed gentility and a backcountry white working class. For the most part, though, her subject is not the majority-black city that Baltimore has become, with its deep problems: a shrinking population, and one of the highest homicide rates in the country. Her characters tend to be white and aspiring middle class and the problems they face are the inherent problems of family life: fighting between parents and kids, and trying to learn from your experience of one of those roles as you tackle the other.
For Jane Austen (Tyler often gets compared to her), the most interesting decision her characters could make was: who should I marry? And Austen realised that the moments leading up to that decision could provide, in novel after novel, both a narrative structure and a deep test of moral sensibility. As Ezra puts it in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, when thinking about his mother: “She had imagined a perfectly wonderful plot—a significance to every chance meeting, the possibility of whirlwind courtships, grand white weddings, flawless bliss forever after.” But Tyler’s subject is mostly what happens afterwards. The scope is larger, and the outcomes messier—because there isn’t a single pressure point on which the stories can converge. And one of the main forces that she tries to catalogue, the effects of a kind of psychological erosion, is more difficult to catch on film. Instead of the grand white wedding, you get, as a character says in Homesick, the “grayness of things; a half-right-and-half-wrongnesss of things. Everything tangled, mingled, not perfect any more.”
Her longevity means that her work has become a record of a certain kind of America, especially of “the dailiness of women’s lives,” for the past half century. They struggle with husbands and kids, increasingly take on work to support the family, maintain homes and traditions—the Halloweens and Thanksgivings that mark the passing year—by sewing, filing, shopping, cooking, baking, and by the kind of attention to detail that turns an occasion into a ritual that can be repeated. But the picture she paints also leaves a lot out. In A Spool of Blue Thread, she acknowledges as much when Abby, a retired social worker, reflects: “Toward the last it had seemed that her clients’ needs were bottomless—that society was falling apart faster than she could patch it together. She was getting out just in time, she had felt.” And the hero of her new book, Redhead by the Side of the Road, echoes the sentiment: “Micah had about given up on this country, to tell the truth. It seemed to be going to hell these days, and he didn’t have the sense he could do anything about it.”
*** The novel that follows keeps its focus on one man’s life. It’s both rather slight and very good; the kind of story that might have made a chapter in one of her longer works. Micah is a handyman and freelance tech nerd: he provides a relatively friendly face for people who need help with their computers. In his mid-forties, financially and emotionally self-sufficient, he lives in the basement of the apartment block where he serves as a superintendent. There are gaps in his life (friends, children, the striving for some harder-to-reach ambition), but he fills them with the daily routine: a morning jog, the weekly cleaning rota (“he had a system: he set the dishes to soak while he wiped the table and countertop, put away the butter, ran his stick vacuum under his chair in case he’d dropped any crumbs. His actual vacuuming day was Friday, but he liked to keep on top of things betweentimes.”) And occasional visits from his girlfriend Cass.
One of Tyler’s strategies is to set up a problem early in a story (a lump in a thigh, a dream of infidelity), and then ignore it while ordinary life goes on, until the ordinary life crashes into the problem again and something has to be done about it. In Micah’s case, the problem is his relationship—or rather, as Philip Larkin might say, the fact that Micah has become “too selfish, withdrawn / And easily bored to love.” Cass is renting an apartment where the landlady won’t tolerate pets; then one day she stumbles upon Cass’s cat and threatens to evict her. When Cass tells Micah he makes a joke about it. He doesn’t say, “you can always stay with me,” because he figures if that’s what she wanted, she would have asked. And so the problems begin.
Tyler’s characters divide into two basic types, with a few crossovers: the mess-makers, and the tidiers. There’s often a gender element to this division but not always. In many of her novels, women provide the mess—and if not women themselves, then the family life they tend to be responsible for. Mess means accumulation of people and possessions and debts, habits and appointments and emotional things, too, resentments and slights and infatuations and regrets. The tidiers try to keep all this in some kind of order. They correct your grammar and clean the oven after every meal and either dream of living alone or already do. They write guidebooks for businessmen who hate travel (The Accidental Tourist) or dream up travel agencies that will manage the disorder of holidays, the packing and arranging and meals (A Spool of Blue Thread), or walk out on marriages or family holidays to escape to some anonymous town where you can rent a room and live more simply and cleanly (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years).
They do these things because family life is messy and most of what you learn from it as a child is conflict-modelling. You learn how to fight from your parents—both because you watch them fight, and because you have to fight with your siblings for their attention. And the only way to escape it, as Larkin again might say (he would have made an interesting Tyler character; Mr Bleaney and Micah Mortimer would get along), is to get out as early as you can and not have any kids yourself. This is more or less what Micah has done. “You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer,” the novel begins. “He lives alone; he keeps to himself; his routine is etched in stone.” The question at the heart of the book is—is he unhappy enough to change?
*** Her work, in spite of all the prizes, has sometimes been accused of cuteness or sentimentality. The conflict between her character types is also the tension at the heart of every novel: to recreate the mess of reality; and to contain it in the shape of a story. And sometimes Tyler’s endings can seem a little tidy—all the details, even some of the symbols, feel a little like they’ve been lined up for a family photograph.
In A Spool of Blue Thread, the wayward son, Denny, goes to his mother’s sewing cupboard after her death, to mend his father’s outfit for the funeral. The necessary spool of thread almost rolls into his hand, as if his mother had reached out to him, in forgiveness—though it’s not quite clear in which direction the forgiveness needs to go. A running joke or motif in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is the family meal that one of the sons, Ezra, who runs the restaurant, always tries to set up—even though they can never make it to the end before somebody walks out in a huff. It’s the kind of repetitive comic failure that feels more like part of a pattern, the weave of a tapestry, than real life.
But that’s partly because Tyler isn’t strictly a realist. And the opposite of sentimentality isn’t realism, it’s just another kind of distortion—cynicism, or whatever you want to call it. One reason she deals in symbols and patterns is because family life is often the closest any of us will get to knowing what it’s like to be a character in a novel, to have a role in an ongoing story, where the role both shapes you and hems you in. Micah, as it happens, has many sisters, and part of the action takes place at one of their extended family dinners, where everybody teases Micah for being an old stick-in-the-mud, a narrow and lonely creature of routine—and Micah finds himself playing along with the joke. Which provides one of those slight incidents that pushes him a little towards a new detachment, a clearer view of himself. He also has to tell his sisters Cass didn’t make it to the dinner because they have broken up, and hear their reactions.
Nabokov, in Pnin, talks about the point of his own fiction: “But don’t you think… that what he is trying to do…practically in all his novels… is to express the fantastic recurrence of certain situations?” Reading a lot of Anne Tyler on the trot can make you think she’s playing a similar game. But that’s partly because her subject matter is narrow enough that you can’t avoid a certain amount of overlap. In Homesick, a teenage boy hitchhikes back to Baltimore under the vague impression that his uncle might be his real dad. And the story in Redhead shifts course when a college-age kid shows up at Micah’s door for a similar reason—his mother used to go out with him at university. It’s a subplot that lets Tyler go back into Micah’s past and play a little revisionist history. Also, to ask and answer questions about how he got this way.
In other ways, though, Redhead does read like an evolution of sorts. It’s not just shorter than most Tyler books, but sparer, too. And apart from the question that frames the novel (“You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer?”), it’s relatively free from commentary. Things, unusual things (it’s not every day that your college girlfriend’s son shows up at your door), happen in the midst of the more usual ones, but they occupy the same kind of attention. And the sequence of events answers a very small question persuasively: what would it take for this lonely guy to realise he’s not that happy? To get a glimpse of the other, available kind of unhappiness: family life.
