Anne Tyler American Literature Analysis
One reason that Tyler’s works are so fascinating is that they are difficult to classify. Although she was born in Minnesota, specialized in Russian, and married an Iranian, Tyler is considered a southern writer because her works are set in the South—the early ones in North Carolina, where she spent her adolescence and attended college, the later novels in Baltimore, where she has lived since the 1960’s. Tyler does not fit the pattern of many southern writers, however, whose characters, often like the authors themselves, are usually an integral part of rural communities where their families have lived for generations. Although the sense of place is important in Tyler’s novels, her emphasis is on the present. Instead of a rural home that a family has occupied for generations, her locale is more likely to be a house in Baltimore—perhaps rented, perhaps occupied for a generation.
Tyler is certainly in the southern tradition, however, when it comes to her emphasis on the importance of community. For example, in her second novel, The Tin Can Tree, she traces the ways in which the accidental death of one young girl affects not only her closest relatives but also the entire community in which the girl lived. The effect of the tragedy on this large group of interrelated people is confined, however, to the present and to the projected future. There is no conjecture as to patterns established in the past, as is found in so much southern fiction.
The protagonists in many southern novels are interesting precisely because they either refuse to accept community standards—rejecting racism, for example—or because, like the lawyer Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), they represent principles that the community professes but which, in practice, it betrays. Tyler’s protagonists are not members of the establishment who are either rebels or idealists. They tend to be eccentrics who are in flight from their societies for no particular reason other than that they possess boundless energy and unrestrained imaginations.
The energetic protagonist appears in a rather peculiar form in Tyler’s first novel, If Morning Ever Comes. At the beginning of the story, Ben Joe Hawkes is in law school in New York City. Unfortunately, his imagination betrays him: He cannot forget the household of women he has left behind in North Carolina, women he is sure cannot manage without him. Desperately worried, Hawkes leaves law school and goes home.
There, when he finds that the women are all doing very well, he feels quite unnecessary and falls into inertia. He apparently will have the energy to move on with his own life only when he knows that a woman is truly dependent on him. Fortunately, he finds an available sweetheart from his high school days and takes her to New York with him, where one assumes he can now be dependent on her dependence.
By the time Tyler wrote A Slipping-Down Life , she had arrived at the peculiar combination of imagination, rebellion, energy, and even frenzy that marks many of her most interesting characters and often the protagonists in her later novels. Teenager Evie Decker loathes her school, her town, and her dull life. Her rebellion has been shown by withdrawal: She has spent most of her life hiding in her own home, merely dreaming of escape. When she falls in love with a rock musician, however, she suddenly has considerable energy. One can only call it a kind of madness when she carves his name on her forehead, thus becoming a local celebrity. It is clear that Evie intends to follow her musician...
(This entire section contains 4137 words.)
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out of the community and into a more exciting world. If at the end of the story Evie is moving back to her old home instead of heading for Hollywood, it is only because the situation has changed. She has a new baby, and she now desires the security of living in a home she owns. Evidently she now has an outlet for her energy.
Energetic, imaginative characters such as Evie Decker never fit easily into communities that, like most groups of people, value the comfortable virtues of moderation, conformity, and predictability. In every human being, Tyler suggests, there are two conflicting tendencies. On one hand, there is the desire for attachment, which draws Evie first toward her musician and eventually back to her own house, and which pulls the protagonist of The Accidental Tourist toward his childhood home, where his sister and his brothers continue to live in a tight little unit. It brings both the law student of If Morning Ever Comes and the long-lost Caleb of Searching for Caleb (1976) back to the families with whom they never did feel particularly comfortable.
On the other hand, there is also the need for privacy, for solitude, for possessing one’s own soul, that the author recognizes in herself. This need may drive one inward, like the artist recluse in Celestial Navigation, or outward into eccentric actions such as those of the protagonist in Morgan’s Passing, who flees from his demanding, overwhelmingly female family into disguise and a fantasy world he can control.
Because her characters keep veering from one direction to the other as one, then another, of the two needs becomes dominant, and because sometimes, like Evie, they finally return to the places where they began, Tyler’s novels have been called unsatisfyingly circular in plot. In all except perhaps the first two novels, however, Tyler is so skilled in tracing the development of character that although the place may be the same, its inhabitants are clearly very different people. It is this emphasis on character that makes her readers ignore the fact that most of her incidents, though amazing and often amusing, are not earthshaking.
When the protagonist of Breathing Lessons slams her newly repaired car into a Pepsi truck, or even when the protagonist of Morgan’s Passing poses as a doctor and delivers a baby, the real interest lies in the motivations of some characters and the reactions of others. Thus, if Tyler’s later novels are no longer accused of formlessness, it must be emphasized that their unity derives less from plotting than from the creation of compelling characters. Tyler’s greatest achievement is her skill in deferring to those characters. As an author she effaces herself, moving among her characters and reproducing their thoughts and their conversations as they rush headlong toward self-discovery.
Searching for Caleb
First published: 1976
Type of work: Novel
A ninety-three-year-old man determinedly seeks his half brother, who disappeared sixty years before.
Searching for Caleb is unique among Tyler’s novels in that it is a detective story. The first scene in the book takes place on a train from Baltimore to New York City, where Daniel Peck and his granddaughter, Justine Peck, hope to find some news of Daniel’s half brother, Caleb Peck, who has been missing for sixty years. Caleb is finally found, thanks to a detective the family has hired; however, it is typical of Tyler’s circuitous plotting that at the end of the story Caleb once again leaves the Peck family, with whom he had never been comfortable.
The conflict in Searching for Caleb is typical for a Tyler novel. The community that demands conformity is the Peck family. As Duncan Peck, the black sheep of the family, says, the Pecks have dug a moat around themselves so that from their castle they can judge and disapprove of the rest of the world. From the time of their birth, Peck children are indoctrinated with rules of behavior. Pointing out to his cousin Justine Mayhew that she is wearing a hat only because it is a Peck practice, the observant Duncan lists all the family customs, such as wearing English riding boots and refusing to develop cavities, and all the family prejudices—against golf, plastic, and emotion, for example. So extensive a code can, like the moat which Duncan mentions, effectively keep non-Pecks at a distance.
It is Justine who develops most during the novel and who, therefore, should be considered the protagonist. Once she has accepted Duncan’s view of the Pecks and, incidentally, married him, Justine becomes one of Tyler’s energetic heroines, whose principle of life seems to be “When in doubt, change.” Because Duncan, too, is both imaginative and energetic, given to undertakings that begin with great promise and, unfortunately, soon bore him, thus ensuring their failure, it is perhaps as well that Justine can live the life of a gypsy, packing up the suitcases, giving away the cats, and moving on at a moment’s notice.
Justine cannot completely forget her Peck upbringing, however, and near the end of the novel she almost succumbs. For her, Duncan offers to settle down, take a job in Baltimore, and live like the rest of the Pecks. Interestingly, it is not merely her love for him that changes Justine’s original decision. It is also the feedback she gets from the Pecks, who seem less than enthusiastic about the possibility. Evidently, she discovers, the adult Pecks like to have one branch of the family living extravagant, colorful lives, just as the young Peck cousins had been delighted to have one of their number behaving like the outrageous Duncan. Both Caleb’s second disappearance and Justine’s arrangements for her family to travel with a carnival, then, are necessary for the existence of the fixed lives of the rest of the Pecks. In this exploration of her theme, Tyler has illustrated the fact that in order for a community to remain healthy, there must be individuals who refuse to follow its rules. Perhaps, too, if individuals are to know the joys of rebellion, there must be Pecks, providing rules for them to defy.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
First published: 1982
Type of work: Novel
A dying woman looks back on her marriage and her stormy family life.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant begins with Pearl Cody Tull’s deathbed reflections and ends with her funeral. Like Searching for Caleb, this novel revolves around an unconventional family in which the mother is a central figure. While the source of Justine’s energy is that of her husband, whom she imitates and even exceeds, the source of Pearl’s is her misery at having been unaccountably deserted by the husband whom she dearly loved. Pearl’s excesses come not from joy in freedom but from anger because she is imprisoned in a life she did not choose.
At thirty, Pearl had been facing spinsterhood. Then she met a loud, brash salesman six years her junior who admired her ladylike behavior and had the power to persuade her that anything in the world was possible. Beck Tull and Pearl hastened into marriage. Eventually, they had three children. When the oldest was entering his teens, Beck disappeared, and it was then that Pearl became almost demented. Somehow she could never tell the children that Beck was never coming back. Trapped in her lie, overburdened by responsibility, and often financially desperate, she would suddenly be overcome by rage, striking out at the very children she had so desired.
Because of their mother’s peculiarities, the Tull children are isolated from the community; however, unlike the eccentric Pecks in Searching for Caleb, they cannot take delight in their own independence. Unfortunately, because no one ever explains to them either their father’s absence or their mother’s furies, they come to see life as dangerous and irrational, and as they grow to adulthood, in different ways they all try to find some kind of security.
The oldest child, Cody Tull, is particularly burdened. Convinced that one of his pranks must have caused his father to leave, Cody has a profound need to control his life so that no such event will ever occur again. His choice of profession is typical of Tyler, who even in tragic stories can amuse her readers with her imaginative but unfaltering logic: Cody becomes an efficiency expert. Unfortunately, he cannot organize his own emotions as well as he can structure a factory. Jealous of his brother’s success with his girlfriends, Cody marries a highly unsuitable woman simply because she is his brother’s fiancée.
Cody’s sister Jenny, too, seeks the rationality which her childhood denied her. The highly intelligent and completely organized Harley Baines seems perfect for her. After she marries Harley, Jenny discovers that his most well-developed faculty is the critical one, and she finds herself constantly under fire. Clearly, she had looked for intellect in a partner when she should have emphasized commitment. Through her pediatric practice, she meets a desperate widower with children of his own, and the household they set up together, though as hectic and unpredictable as that of her childhood, is extremely happy because it is founded on love, not on anger.
It is Ezra Tull, however, the middle child and his mother’s favorite, whose dreams of a harmonious family life are reflected in the book title. After Ezra becomes the owner of a restaurant where he has long been working, he changes its image and its name. “The Homesick Restaurant” is intended to cater to everyone who, like Ezra, associates food with the security of a loving family. Ironically, every time Ezra brings the family together for a fine meal, they quarrel and someone walks out. The only meal that is ever completed is the feast after Pearl’s funeral, when the missing Beck Tull, who had stormed out, consents to return and finish his meal with the family he had deserted.
The excuse Beck gives for leaving his family, which caused so much pain to four people, is that Pearl could see his faults and he could not bear it. Although Tyler will never glorify conformity for its own sake, in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant she makes it clear that unloving, irresponsible egotism such as Beck’s cannot be justified, whatever the claims of the individual.
The Accidental Tourist
First published: 1985
Type of work: Novel
A travel writer who hates to travel learns to accept the unexpected and, in the process, takes control of his own life.
Of all Tyler’s characters, Macon Leary, the protagonist of The Accidental Tourist, is undoubtedly the one most obsessed with routine. A travel writer who hates to travel, he has developed guides for other travelers who want to reproduce their home environments as much as possible when they are abroad. Leary’s life has been based on the assumption that he could outwit chance simply by planning carefully. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the novel, his only child has been killed in a random crime at a fast-food store, and, unable to cope with the death, Macon’s wife, Susan, has left him.
Macon’s first impulse is to order his household; however, his efforts at efficiency are less than successful, and he ends up with a broken leg. With considerable relief, he moves into the orderly household his sister, Rose, runs for their two brothers. The portrait of the four Leary children, all of whom have now returned home, symbolizes the security that Macon feels, having moved back into the unchanging past. It seems that conformity will win over the chaos that Macon so dreads.
Somewhat earlier in the story, however, Tyler has introduced one of her energetic women, Muriel Pritchett, a veterinarian’s assistant with a young son and a mind of her own. Before long, Muriel is training Macon’s aggressive dog and bringing Macon himself into her disorderly, fascinating world, where the unexpected is cherished. Finally, Macon must choose between returning to Susan, whose very body is comfortably familiar, and moving ahead in an adventuresome life with Muriel, where his only certainty will be her good nature.
In The Accidental Tourist, several characters move back and forth between individualism and conformity, disorder and order. For example, Rose Leary, who is responsible for keeping the family home untouched by time, falls in love with Julian Edge, Macon’s boss, a breezy, confident person who carries her away from what might seem to be a dull life. Julian has not reckoned with Rose’s appetite for order, however, and before long, she returns to the family home and her old life. Only Macon’s inventiveness saves the marriage; remembering the chaos of Julian’s office, he suggests that Julian beg her help in getting it under control. Julian is finally the convert to conformity; the man who, Tyler says, never even consulted a consumer magazine before buying something, moves into the Leary household and happily takes part in their routine.
Two of the characters, Alexander Pritchett, Muriel’s son, and Susan Leary, Macon’s wife, are deeply troubled at the beginning of the novel. Allergic to everything, enthusiastic about nothing, Alexander evidently bears the burden of feeling unwanted by his father and perhaps also of his mother’s eccentricity. He lacks something—the company of men, his mother thinks, but it may be a feeling of family structure as well. The turning point for Alexander comes in a scene that illustrates Tyler’s subtle blend of humor and pathos. Macon decides to show Alexander how to repair a faucet; furthermore, he insists that the boy do it himself. When he succeeds, Alexander smiles for the first time. It is obvious that Alexander has a need for order which his mother cannot fulfill but which Macon can.
In the grief-stricken, gloomy Susan Leary who is introduced in the first chapter of The Accidental Tourist, it is hard to imagine the high-spirited young woman whom Macon married. It is not too surprising that the father and mother of the murdered boy cannot share their feelings with each other. What is surprising is the turn that Susan takes later in her life. After she goes to Paris with Macon, it seems that their marriage has been patched up; however, the once mercurial woman now seems to be clutching at order and pattern. When Susan starts to plan every detail of their trip together, Macon realizes that he must return to Muriel, who saves that kind of bossiness for the dogs she is training. At the end of the novel, everyone except Susan has learned to live in tension between order and disorder, conformity and individualism.
Breathing Lessons
First published: 1988
Type of work: Novel
During a one-day automobile trip on the way to a funeral, a couple recall and strengthen their twenty-eight-year marriage.
If Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Morgan’s Passing are Tyler’s darkest works, Breathing Lessons is one of her most optimistic. Even though many of the misadventures in all of her novels are comic, in those earlier works one cannot escape the suggestion that life consists mostly of missed opportunities. In Breathing Lessons, on the other hand, one feels that nothing is lost, that everything can be renewed, repaired, or redeemed.
The renewal that is central in Breathing Lessons is the twenty-eight-year marriage between Maggie and Ira Moran. At first glance, Maggie and Ira would seem completely unsuited to each other. Ira is rational and precise. His heroine is advice columnist Ann Landers, who personifies common sense. Maggie, on the other hand, has contempt for logic. Compassionate, ebullient, and friendly as a puppy, she moves through life as if it were a festival. In fact, that is one of the things that so annoys Ira. She does not take life seriously, he thinks; she acts as if it were all a practice for something else.
The action of Breathing Lessons takes place in a single day, during which Maggie, impulsive as usual, insists on going to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania, in order to attend the funeral of her girlhood friend’s husband. Throughout that day, Maggie and Ira squabble, revealing their irreconcilable differences, draw apart, then forgive each other, remember how charming those differences have always been, and come back together. On the way to the wedding, for example, Maggie has an accident, forgets the road map, and stops to befriend people all along the way. When Ira, quite understandably, becomes annoyed, Maggie insists on getting out of the car. Even when Ira returns for her, things are not quite back to normal. When the friend shows some old pictures, however, Maggie gets sentimental, Ira remembers that it was her confidence about life that attracted him to Maggie in the first place, and the two start making love in the widow’s upstairs bedroom, only to be discovered and kicked out of the house.
This same ebb and flow is evident in Maggie’s relationship with her daughter-in-law, Fiona, who is separated from her husband, Jesse, who is busy trying to find himself. After Maggie persuades Ira to make a side trip to see their grandson, she decides to bring Fiona and Jesse together; with the help of a few blatant lies she drags Fiona and the child back to Baltimore. Throughout this adventure, Ira is appalled. He never did think that the marriage would work—but then, he is married to the same energetic, illogical woman who once recklessly pursued a purse snatcher for the sake of a few dollars. Maggie never calculates odds. She is hardly discouraged when Fiona and Jesse quarrel and part once again. The conclusion of the novel suggests that Tyler can see some victories for energetic, well-meaning, if disorderly characters such as Maggie. The widow apologizes, Ira once again falls under Maggie’s spell, and undaunted, Maggie secretly begins to plan another campaign.
A Patchwork Planet
First published: 1998
Type of work: Novel
The black sheep of a prominent family discovers who he really is and what constitutes a meaningful life.
Although Anne Tyler had previously used male protagonists in her fiction, until A Patchwork Planet she had never had a male first-person narrator. However, since the novel is about Barnaby Gaitlin’s discovery of his own identity, the author’s decision to let Barnaby tell his own story was a wise one.
A Patchwork Planet begins on New Year’s Eve and ends on the following Christmas. Whenever the socially prominent Gaitlins have one of their ceremonial gatherings, they make it clear that they are ashamed of Barnaby. In his youth, he was arrested for housebreaking and escaped punishment only because his parents paid a hefty sum as restitution. Barnaby has never repaid them. He dropped out of college, and though his family offered him a job at their Gaitlin Foundation, instead he took a job with Rent-a-Back, which assigns employees to perform chores for those who are ill or elderly. Barnaby has not even succeeded at marriage. His wife, Natalie, left him because he lacked both money and social standing. Now remarried and living in Baltimore, she discourages his visits to their daughter, Opal, whom Natalie is rearing to be as snobbish and superficial as she is.
At thirty, Barnaby is pinning his hopes on a visitation from the Gaitlin angel, which showed one family member how to make a fortune and kept another from losing everything. At the beginning of the novel, Barnaby toys with the idea that a beautiful young woman whom he observed in the Baltimore train station may indeed be that angel. Although he later realizes that Sophia Maynard is not a supernatural being but an ordinary bank employee, he recognizes her as an energetic woman who he thinks has a loving heart. Unfortunately, he misjudges her, for when her elderly mother accuses him of stealing money from her, Sophia believes that Barnaby is guilty.
Although eventually the missing money is found, Barnaby breaks off with Sophia, who he now knows is a carbon copy of his former wife. However, the incident has shown Barnaby how many people admire him. His clients besieged his employer with requests for his services, thus making sure that he would not be fired. Moreover, one of his fellow employees, Martine Pasko, risked her own job in order to help him. Although, as the story ends, Barnaby has still not had a visitation from the family angel, he now believes that Martine may well be its earthly manifestation.
A Patchwork Planet derives its title from a quilt representing Planet Earth that Barnaby’s client Mrs. Alford was determined to finish before she died. With its imperfect pieces and its uneven stitches, the quilt seemed to be a metaphor for human life. It fell as short of perfection as Barnaby Gaitlin does. To her grieving daughter, however, Mrs. Alford’s quilt seemed beautiful. As Barnaby comes to see, it is loving acts, not material objects, that give life its meaning, and a person who has the skill and the inclination to perform such acts of grace is truly successful.