Breathing Lessons
Beverly, Elizabeth
BOOKS The tidy plans that crumbled Walking into the wide but comfort able expanse of an Anne Tyler novel can feel like settling down into a porch swing on a late summer evening. The neighbors...
...Should a reviewer criticize a gifted novelist for seeming to refuse the high moral charge of art...
...These neighbors' lives sound familiar, but quirky...
...Despite the tantalizing hint of' 'How To'' in the title, Breathing Lessons lets us sit back in our own more or less comfortably rocking lives without a thought of change...
...People were squandering their lives, it seemed to him...
...And his wife...
...Elizabeth Beverly riage, longing for the grandchild whom the couple haven't seen in years...
...The neighbors on the porch next door begin to talk as the swing easily glides...
...During the course of the novel, we sit through a funeral designed to make a widow feel better, a wedding rehearsal, a film of a wedding, some choir practice, a few moments in church...
...It's no surprise that Maggie's longing for family union seems at moments almost monstrous...
...About her kindly meant deceptions, Ira asserts,"It's Maggie's weakness: She believes it's all right to alter people's lives...
...In fact, the narrative ambles easily, delightfully, at times preposterously...
...She's having trouble walking in her "crisp black pumps....Another problem was that the crotch of her panty hose had somehow slipped to about the middle of her thighs, so she had to take shortened, unnaturally level steps like a chunky little wind-up toy wheeling along the sidewalk...
...Tyler is going to let them tell us...
...And it is this quirki-ness that grabs us, a whimsy that makes us more than simply interested in the stories they tell...
...she's more scatterbrained than eccentric, more endearing than downright lovable, more "inventive" than simply dishonest...
...And so the novel closes with Ira playing solitaire on his side of the bed, and Maggie settling down on her side of the bed...
...The more sober of the two main characters, he provides the weight to hold the narrative on course...
...There is no changing them...
...As soon as we meet her on her unsteady way to the body shop, we suspect we shall like her...
...BOOKS The tidy plans that crumbled Walking into the wide but comfortable expanse of an Anne Tyler novel can feel like settling down into a porch swing on a late summer evening...
...She's not going to talk about her characters, but rather quite deftly smuggle us into their lives, slip us into their skins...
...Does the novelist owe the reader a kick in the pants...
...Anne Tyler Breathing Lessons Chunky little Maggie wheels right through the day...
...Breathing Lessons is the story of that quest, modest by the standards of imaginative literature, but deeply felt...
...But I feel bad that by the end of Maggie's novel I can take her no more seriously than Ira or even Tyler...
...Back and forth, back and forth...
...It's as if Maggie, Tyler's creation, has more faith in herself and in the world than Tyler herself does...
...I believe that the skewing begins with the conceptualization of Maggie, in whose mind we ride throughout two of the three major sections of the novel...
...Perhaps she wants us to recognize that comfort doesn't depend upon how such a day ultimately turns out, but upon the fact that such a day can happen at all, that past, future, and present can occasionally stream through us all at once, and make life appear full and rich and possible...
...But even as I write these words, I sense that I am making Tyler's novel sound much more earnest than it really is...
...She seemed to believe it was sort of a practice life, something she could afford to play around with as if they offered second and third chances to get it right.'' Ira's insight evolves from his conviction that human life is full of waste, particularly poignant since Ira's youthful ambition to become a doctor was swallowed years earlier by the obligations he assumed for his family, not only for Maggie and their children, but also for his weak father and two dependent sisters, one developmentally disabled, the other emotionally so...
...It's not the wrenching, chilling wail of wife to husband that, I suspect, could help us think about our own lives, our own loves...
...For she is a neighbor who would want to make my life better if she could, if only I could let her words reach me, disturb me, wake me from my nightlong, easy swing...
...And we do believe Ira...
...I think she believes that the lives she has invented for Maggie and Ira are simply what they are...
...Should they exist simply for our amusement and then be put cozily to bed at day's end before the novelist has even begun to engage in the heartfelt pain they've expressed...
...Certain novelists could be described in the same way as Maggie, but I suspect that Tyler agrees with Ira about the suitability of such imaginative whim...
...There is no promise of any greater union than that expressed in amicable silence...
...By the time we are allowed into Ira's head, we find that "he loved her, but he couldn't stand how she refused to take her own life seriously...
...Should this bother us...
...Or he ought to...
...But what about the characters whose lives we've followed so faithfully...
...She is the one who sees what to do, where to go, proceeds through the day and, we suspect, through life, with the only authority this family knows...
...But the novel itself is Maggie's own crazily conceived course...
...This authority gets her into trouble, makes her appear ridiculous: to Ira, to her children, to us...
...As Maggie and Ira undertake this rather haphazard daylong journey, we realize from their cascading memories and hopes that they are both in search of nothing less than the meaning of family...
...If this is the case, then it is a mercy that Maggie can so simply close down and go to sleep...
...But not seriously enough, if we're to believe Ira...
...The problem is not that the book veers to whimsy, but more that the easy, whimsical tone creates a false sense of peace and thereby devalues the actual longing which rips through the hearts of the characters for whom we care...
...Imagine the ease of sitting in a porch swing and hearing not only the neighbors' conversation, but overhearing the minds of me neighbors as they sit in silence, unable or unwilling to speak, yearning to make sense of their particular lot...
...He loved her, but he couldn't stand how she refused to take her own life seriously...
...Perhaps Tyler wants us to believe this cozy separation is happiness, that Maggie's ambition is unrealistic, therefore laughable...
...She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her view of them...
...But nothing sacred disturbs the quality of these lives...
...Just as the car can't stay fixed, the day's tidy plans crumble, and a quest begins...
...Tyler's world, full of the wonders of language and the tenacity of hope, is an insistently secular world...
...No, no, and no...
...By this point, we feel like Ira, convinced that if an automatic "there, now, sweetheart" will not answer her, at least it will comfort her, and let her sleep...
...The minds we overhear in Tyler's eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, belong to Maggie and Ira Moran on a late summer Saturday, as the middle-aged couple drive out of their ordinary suburban Baltimore life to the funeral of Maggie's best friend's husband in rural Pennsylvania...
...As soon as we meet her, we learn to laugh with her and at her...
...There are no answers to these question to a reader to raise such questions at all, to imagine that characters are trapped by the very form that creates them, then we're in the presence of an oddly skewed work, one which raises expectations it has no intention of meeting...
...The sure prose, the wonderful telling details, the concerns of busybody Maggie and silent, kind Ira create a world in which we can remain interested, intrigued perhaps, but undisturbed...
...The trip to the midmorn-ing service should be easy enough, Ira should even be back in time to open his framing shop for afternoon business, but before departure, on page five, as Maggie drives out of the auto body shop, she hears a voice on the radio that sends her lurching into the street, into a new minor accident that seems to loosen everything: the previously intact fender, the past, hopes for the future, faith BREATHDIG LESSORS Anne Tyler Alfred A. Knopf, $18.95, 327 pp...
...We stick with her because she's funny, always on the verge of amazement, and takes herself half seriously...
...If we are drawn to Tyler's fiction for many of the same reasons that we might be drawn to gossip (just how do other people live...
...For the past several months now, Ira had been noticing the human race's wastefulness...
...The fact that Ira's section occupies the physical center of the novel seems to be no accident...
...So, by the time we reach the final pages of the novel, the final hours of the da.y, Maggie's last utterance sounds simply "just like Maggie...
...What does the novelist owe them...
...Oh, Ira, ...what are we two going to live for, all the rest of our lives...
...He was fifty years old and had never accomplished one single act of consequence...
...Once he had planned to find a cure for some major disease and now he was framing petit point instead...
Vol. 116 • February 1989 • No. 4
