[In the following review, Jacobs claims that although Back When We Were Grownups is a good read, it is not one of Tyler's best novels.]

Anne Tyler's characters can be so familiar and so fully imagined and presented that reading a Tyler novel is a bit like visiting with the family down the road, albeit a family with many quirks. in Back When We Were Grownups Rebecca Davitch, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother who runs a catering business, The Open Arms, in her home, is trying to make sense of her past and define her future against the backdrop of fashioning celebrations of life's events for strangers.

Rebecca is left alone after her husband's death to deal with three grown stepdaughters and one grown daughter of her own. The plot is fairly simple—the novel chronicles her attempts to recapture her earlier self through rekindling her first love with her college boyfriend, Will Allenby—but the real strength of the novel is in the episodic portrayal of the characters and the struggle to come to terms with how a life turns out. Rebecca revisits her past—“Might-have-been slid imperceptibly into could-still-be—a much more satisfying fantasy”—to conjure what might happen if she rekindles her past with Will. She eventually tracks him down—not a difficult endeavor since he is teaching at the college they both attended—and an anemic, less than romantic man is turned into a talisman for a short time.

Tyler's style is graceful and even felicitous, but the daughters, whose names are too cutesy (NoNo, Patch, Min Foo, and Biddy), don't always ring true, nor does her late husband's moonabout pediatrician brother who has a crush on Rebecca. But her father-in-law, Poppy, who is approaching his one-hundredth birthday, is a well-drawn character who provides Rebecca with a sense of connection: “If this turned out to be Poppy's deathbed, heaven forbid, how strange that she should be standing beside it! Ninety-nine years ago, when he had come into the world, nobody could have foreseen that an overweight college dropout from Church Valley, Virginia—not even a Davitch, strictly speaking—would be the one to hold his hand as he left it.”

The real thrust of the novel is Rebecca's often misguided search for self-definition: “It occurred to her that so far, the only step she'd taken toward retrieving that old Rebecca was to try and reconnect with the old Rebecca's boyfriend. Like some fluff-headed girl from the fifties, she had assumed she would reach her goal by riding a man's coattails.” This isn't a feminist novel in any militant sense, but it is a novel of rediscovery where a grown woman is caught unawares by the meaning in her own life.

Tyler has written more complex and satisfying novels—Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant comes to mind—and Back When We Were Grownups doesn't rank among her best. But Rebecca Davitch is a finely drawn character with foibles, humor, and strength, and the novel she inhabits makes for a good, if slight, read.