|
Anne Tyler’s The Amateur Marriage is a good book for a summer holiday: nice and fat, easy to read, with compelling characters and a three-hanky plot.
Like many of Tyler’s previous novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Breathing Lessons, The Amateur Marriage is about a couple struggling through a difficult marriage.
Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay meet just after the attack on Pearl Harbour. They are a terrible mismatch from the start: he is stolid, unsociable, unimaginative, and she is emotional, impulsive, overwrought. They have three children and move out of downtown Baltimore into 1950s suburbia. Their eldest daughter disappears. Years later, Michael and Pauline fly to San Francisco where their daughter has turned up, drugged out and embraced by a cult-like religion. Unable to rescue her, they return home with her abandoned three-year-old son, whom they raise to adulthood. None of these tumultuous events moves them to speak honestly to one another. Like moons circling in orbit around the same planet—the reference point of their marriage—they never meet.
After thirty years, the marriage ends. But the book does not, and that’s for the best. By pushing the story beyond its logical, easy conclusion into unknown territory, Tyler creates rich and rewarding scenes of aftermath.
The Amateur Marriage is not without its flaws. The first chapter is the weakest, told from the perspective of the older women in Baltimore’s Polish community who observe fondly the lovestruck couple and their stormy courtship. There’s a pervading sense of déjà vu, as if we’ve already seen the movie version. Nor does the language sparkle with originality: "They were such a perfect couple. They were taking their very first steps on the amazing journey of their marriage, and wonderful adventures were about to unfold in front of them."
But the book gets better. As is often the case, its weaknesses are also its strengths. The familiarity of the storyline and the characters, even the simplicity of the telling, begin to work to its benefit. Characters’ reactions are surprising and moving. And like people who are almost too familiar, Michael and Pauline are simultaneously irritating in their habits and banalities, and sympathetic and moving in their hopes and attempts.
Each chapter is told in the third person from a different perspective, including Michael’s, Pauline’s, and several of their children’s, and each recalls a discrete moment in the couple’s history, almost as if it were a short story rather than a traditional chapter. This structure creates the sense of looking at a family photo album, with the important moments carefully chosen and displayed—or perhaps these captured moments only seem important, and it is the very act of recording history that gives it currency.
In truth, The Amateur Marriage does not reflect deeply on these ideas. It is not a book about ideas or history, but about relationships, endings, mortality, and ultimately that is where it succeeds. I was drawn into the story and moved by it, and the characters remained with me afterwards, which is a magic that Tyler, no amateur, makes look easy.
Read more about The Amateur Marriage.
|
my cart |
Hair Hat, Carrie Snyder's acclaimed collection of stories, was called "a potent work of original imagination" by The Edmonton Journal. Ian McGillis of The Montreal Gazette wrote, "On finishing the last story in this book, I did something very few short-story collections have ever prompted me to do: I turned back to the beginning and started reading again.” To read an excerpt from Hair Hat, click 
