Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Tyler, Anne (Vol. 205) - Publishers Weekly (review date 22 December 2003)

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Publishers Weekly (review date 22 December 2003)

SOURCE: Review of The Amateur Marriage, by Anne Tyler. Publishers Weekly 250, no. 51 (22 December 2003): 37.

[In the following review of The Amateur Marriage, the critic maintains that “the range and power of this novel should not only please Tyler's immense readership but also awaken us to the collective excellence of her career.”]

Because Tyler writes with scrupulous accuracy about muddled, unglamorous suburbanites, it is easy to underestimate her as a sort of Pyrex realist. Yes, Tyler intuitively understands the middle class's Norman Rockwell ideal, but she doesn't share it; rather, she has a masterful ability to make it bleed. Her latest novel [The Amateur Marriage] delineates, in careful strokes, the 30-year marriage of Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay, and its dissolution. In December 1941 in St. Cassians, a mainly Eastern European conclave in...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Sanjukta Dasgupta (essay date winter 1997)
   2. Elizabeth Mahn Nollen (essay date 1997)
   3. James Grove (essay date 1997)
   4. Linda Simon (review date August 1998)
   5. Joyce R. Durham (essay date fall 1998)
   6. Cheryl Devon Coleman (essay date summer 2000)
   7. Nora Foster Stovel (review date January 2001)
   8. Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson (essay date spring 2001)
   9. Anita Brookner (review date 2 June 2001)
   10. Ellen Cronan Rose (review date July 2001)
   11. Rita D. Jacobs (review date spring 2002)
   12. Barbara Harrell Carson (essay date fall-winter 2002)
   13. Paul Christian Jones (essay date spring 2003)
   14. Publishers Weekly (review date 22 December 2003)
   15. Anita Brookner (review date 3 January 2004)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Anne Tyler