The Amateur Marriage
Tyler, Anne & Allitt, Patrick
The Amateur Marriage Patrick Allitt M ichael Anton and Pauline Barclay, the mismatched couple in Anne Tyler's new novel, just can't get along. Why did they ever get married? Because, when...
...Almost from the beginning their relationship goes wrong, but its persistence creates the book's painful drama...
...Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice With commentary by: Mary Gordon Millicent McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College, essayist and bestselling novelist Richard Giannone, Ph.D...
...Pauline was about to send him a "Dear John" letter but feels she cannot let down her wounded warrior...
...They act more in response to this awareness than to the people they are getting to know, which gives Tyler the opportuz Saint Mary -of-theWoods College INDISSOLUBLE BONDS Commonweal 24 May 21, 2004 Join us for a day of learning and lively discourse on topics related to Catholicism in America...
...Tyler shifts dramat-ically not only from one decade to the next but from one observer to another...
...Tyler uses dramatic time shifts with each new chapter...
...4 p.m...
...When we see their conflict through daughter Karen's eyes, we also learn how acutely the children suffer from their parents' constant bickering and awkward reconciliations...
...The national drama provokes their meeting, they fall in love, and he responds to her patriotic ardor by joining the army...
...Tyler has written a superb novel about the lives of jarringly ordinary people...
...Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints David Gibson The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism Dr...
...others show the characters remembering miserable episodes from years gone by...
...After the war they move from the ethnic neighborhood to a new suburban development and their children become a little part of the Baby Boom...
...She's impulsive, lively, chatty, and outgoing...
...Mark Massa, S.J...
...He thinks she drives badly, lies to him about where she has been, and nags him to take more initiative...
...In a climactic scene, when all the main characters finally get together after years of delay and separation, and ought to be passing judgment on their entire lifetimes—asking and answering the biggest questions about life and death—they just mumble about the weather and recipes, and utter cliches about how quickly the children are growing up...
...Sometimes we see the world through Michael's eyes and share his annoyance at his wife's flightiness, irresponsibility with money, and indiscreet talk...
...From the moment another soldier shoots Michael in the ass during basic training, he loses his chance of becoming a war hero...
...Only readers lucky enough to have lived lives of flawless tranquillity will find this novel's emotional terrain completely alien...
...Patrick Allitt, professor of American history at Emory University, is the author, most recently, of Religion in America Since 1945: A History (Columbia University Press...
...One episode Karen witnesses as an anxious twelveyear-old: "Pauline," their father had said, in a heavy, sighing tone, and after that had come the usual ruffled feathers and sharp words and tears and shouting and slamming and painful, obvious silences followed by (even worse) the icky-poo reconciliation scene a couple of days later, all lovey-dovey and cooing, the bedroom door shut and furtively locked, and their shy, foolish faces afterwards...
...As the two, now middle-aged, take tentative steps in search of other partners, each has the former spouse powerfully in mind...
...She guides us skillfully through mid- and late-twentieth-century history, creating vivid backdrops for scenes from the couple's anguished marriage...
...Even on their wedding day she briefly changes her mind but then grits her teeth and walks up to the altar...
...She sees him endlessly checking that everything's OK at the store, endlessly going over family accounts, pointedly turning off the radio to create silence at home, and declining to take even the smallest risk...
...He is a workingclass Polish-American Catholic from downtown...
...Tyler s style is straightforward, but she knows how to evoke every gradation of regret, discomfort, irritation, embarrassment, mortification, annoyance, and rage...
...Then we see the world through her eyes and feel the suffocating blanket he has thrown over her hopes...
...lIE l )IlJIl[ J\1.1vI New York City's Jesuit University nity to explore more dimensions of the psychological damage they have provoked and endured...
...by calling (212) 636-6574...
...Because, when Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Baltimore was seized by an angry patriotic fervor that brought diverse people together, suspending the rules of everyday life...
...The shabby downtown grocery Michael owns morphs into a fine-foods suburban deli, then gets taken over by a supermarket chain...
...Michael and Pauline watch, powerless, as their own bodies and minds gradually decline...
...They squeeze the crisis down, fit it to the cramped dimensions of their lives, and carry on as before...
...Because it all takes place in the context of their undeniable love and attraction, there can be no clean exit or ending...
...Tiny disagreements balloon into fights and crises, and when they eventually face a major problem their effort to solve it together does nothing to heal the rift...
...The novel's one great tragic event grows directly from the stress such episodes produce in the children, who can't be fooled by their parents' attempts at reassurance...
...both are just twenty...
...son George becomes a conformist businessman, while younger daughter Karen develops into a do-good feminist and antipoverty lawyer...
...Professor of English, Fordham University and author of Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist This event is free and open to the public...
...He's introspective, morose, and pedantic...
...Please R.S.V.P...
...At first I thought Tyler had taken a misstep in separating her protagonists, but it wasn't long be-fore I realized that she knew exactly what she was doing...
...Commonweal 2 5 May 21, 2004...
...Fordham University Lincoln Center Campus Fordham University School of Law McNally Amphitheatre Discussions and book signings featuring: Paul Elie The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage Elizabeth A. Johnson, C.S.J., Ph.D...
...Michael's grumpy, care-worn mother, an uprooted representative of the old immigrant Baltimore, lives out her days with them and adds to the friction...
...Their older daughter, Lindy, be-comes a beatnik, then a hippie in the 1960s...
...The story reminds us that we can't avoid storing up and lugging around our personal histories, and can't distinguish as clearly as we might like to between the good and bad in our-selves and one another...
...New Directions in American Catholic Studies Friday, 28 May 2004 9:30 a.m...
...In their thoughts they frame great questions, but never find the words (or the nerve) to voice them...
...Decades of tension and conflict ensue...
...Squarely in the foreground are the competing emotional stress of their lives, and the damage it inflicts on them and others...
...Psychological repression was never explored more effectively...
...the book begins in 1941 and ends in 2001, just after the United States has suffered another surprise at-tack...
...Some scenes depict the sudden appearance of conflict due to an ambiguous word or a genuine misunderstanding...
...he develops the physical limp which will symbolize his inadequate life...
...It is giving nothing away to reveal that eventually, in the 1970s, Michael and Pauline divorce...
...she is a middle-class WASP St ii from the suburbs...
...They have a sense of duty—to each other, to the family, and to social propriety—yet neither has the extraordinary gifts that would be necessary to enable them to overcome their differences...
Vol. 131 • May 2004 • No. 10
