Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Tyler, Anne (Vol. 205) - Linda Simon (review date August 1998)
Tyler, Anne (Vol. 205) - Linda Simon (review date August 1998)
Linda Simon (review date August 1998)
SOURCE: Simon, Linda. Review of A Patchwork Planet, by Anne Tyler. World and I 13, no. 8 (August 1998): 274-77.
[In the following review, Simon praises Tyler's characterization of Barnaby, the protagonist of The Patchwork Planet.]
In her fourteenth novel [A Patchwork Planet], Anne Tyler illuminates heroism in the small gestures of ordinary life.
In an interview early in her career, Anne Tyler admitted that one of her motivations for writing fiction was a desire to inhabit other characters, to live other lives. Asked what kind of work she would do if she were not a writer, Tyler revealed an attraction “toward manual labor, mainly. I'd like to run a repair shop for toys. I'd like to start an herb farm. And it wouldn't be so bad working for one of those companies that takes on odd jobs for old ladies—driving them to their palmists, collecting their ground-rents for them.”
...[The entire page is 1964 words long]
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Criticism
- Sanjukta Dasgupta (essay date winter 1997)
- Elizabeth Mahn Nollen (essay date 1997)
- James Grove (essay date 1997)
- Linda Simon (review date August 1998)
- Joyce R. Durham (essay date fall 1998)
- Cheryl Devon Coleman (essay date summer 2000)
- Nora Foster Stovel (review date January 2001)
- Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson (essay date spring 2001)
- Anita Brookner (review date 2 June 2001)
- Ellen Cronan Rose (review date July 2001)
- Rita D. Jacobs (review date spring 2002)
- Barbara Harrell Carson (essay date fall-winter 2002)
- Paul Christian Jones (essay date spring 2003)
- Publishers Weekly (review date 22 December 2003)
- Anita Brookner (review date 3 January 2004)
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