The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler
September 5th 2006 07:10
The fifth anniversary of 9/11 is coming up and so I will write about 9/11 literature, literature touched by those events, as much as I can in the next few days.
Anne Tyler has always had plenty of admirers and is routinely called one of the best writers writing in America today. At first glance, her novel The Amateur Marriage is no different from the rest of her novels. It is set in Baltimore as the rest of her novels are and traverses the same territory that her readers are familiar with. It starts with a heart-hammering flourish but slowly gets bogged down. Tyler’s novels regularly fall into two camps: some like The Accidental Tourist read like the wake of a bullet train and some like Morgan’s Passing stop in the tracks without moving forward. You fear that this is what is happening. But once Tyler has her characters visit San Francisco, an exotic move, considering that most of her novels never move out of Baltimore, the pace of the book falls into place.
The novel is about a young man and woman who marry in the heat of the Second World War but bravely try to keep their marriage and family together afterward. Their marriage comes under strain when their eldest daughter turns into a drug-crazed hippie and runs away from home (an angle explored in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral). Years later, they are forced to take care of their grandson they didn’t know they had. Eventually, they separate. He marries another woman. She doesn’t. And the novels runs along showing different aspects of their lives at different times till one of them dies. Vintage Anne Tyler territory.
But, it also happens to be her first novel to appear after the events of September 11. Even if they did not explicitly deal with it, many of American writers’ first novels after those events were touched but them as if they had gone through a spasm. The Amateur Marriage does explicitly reference 9/11 though what it has to say about the terrorist attacks seems bland, even banal. Then, you realise that this novel has run from Second World War to the present and in its small spaced-out vignettes of a small, suburban family has drawn on almost all the major aspects of American History in the last fifty years and told you what it was to live through all those long, hard years. It doesn’t come to an easy conclusion, most of her novels never do. It is a strange, domesticised but necessary recapitulation of what America was when it seemed for a few seconds that America itself went down and disappeared in the fog of smoke.
Anne Tyler has always had plenty of admirers and is routinely called one of the best writers writing in America today. At first glance, her novel The Amateur Marriage is no different from the rest of her novels. It is set in Baltimore as the rest of her novels are and traverses the same territory that her readers are familiar with. It starts with a heart-hammering flourish but slowly gets bogged down. Tyler’s novels regularly fall into two camps: some like The Accidental Tourist read like the wake of a bullet train and some like Morgan’s Passing stop in the tracks without moving forward. You fear that this is what is happening. But once Tyler has her characters visit San Francisco, an exotic move, considering that most of her novels never move out of Baltimore, the pace of the book falls into place.
Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage
The novel is about a young man and woman who marry in the heat of the Second World War but bravely try to keep their marriage and family together afterward. Their marriage comes under strain when their eldest daughter turns into a drug-crazed hippie and runs away from home (an angle explored in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral). Years later, they are forced to take care of their grandson they didn’t know they had. Eventually, they separate. He marries another woman. She doesn’t. And the novels runs along showing different aspects of their lives at different times till one of them dies. Vintage Anne Tyler territory.
But, it also happens to be her first novel to appear after the events of September 11. Even if they did not explicitly deal with it, many of American writers’ first novels after those events were touched but them as if they had gone through a spasm. The Amateur Marriage does explicitly reference 9/11 though what it has to say about the terrorist attacks seems bland, even banal. Then, you realise that this novel has run from Second World War to the present and in its small spaced-out vignettes of a small, suburban family has drawn on almost all the major aspects of American History in the last fifty years and told you what it was to live through all those long, hard years. It doesn’t come to an easy conclusion, most of her novels never do. It is a strange, domesticised but necessary recapitulation of what America was when it seemed for a few seconds that America itself went down and disappeared in the fog of smoke.
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