Watching the Ordinary People

...I can't remember encountering a more poignant scene than the one in which he reads an entry revealing her ecstasy and promise at age 18...

...We exult in the happy ending, which seems almost too good to be true...

...But I've loved other people as much...

...Maggie and Ira are down for a duet: "Love is a Many-Splendored Thing...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" When the second chapter of Anne Tyler's latest novel came out in the New Yorker, I thought it was the most satisfying story I had read there in a decade...

...An amazingly bountiful one is offered Jeremy, the preoccupied artist who strives to cope with real-life demands in Celestial Navigation, but it is taken away again, through simple and unbearable human misunderstanding...

...In the opening chapter of the novel, even on the way to the funeral, Maggie leaves Ira, getting out of the car and walking along the highway, recalling injustices and making elaborate plans for a new life...

...once forbidden by parents), now stands beside her singing...

...Tyler clearly is no feminist, seeing half of humanity good and the other half villainous...

...In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Ezra tries time after time to put on a festive family reunion, but concludes in the end, "I really, honestly believe I missed some rule that everyone else takes for granted...

...In Dinner at the Homesick Restauran t Ezra is faithfully taking care of his difficult mother who has alienated her other sons and daughters...

...We're not in the hands of fate after all,' she seemed to be saying...

...I should have realized: People aren't like that...

...Then she is saved...

...The result is a different view of the two men, and a brave resolve: "She made up her mind that when the funeral was over she would stride of fin her own direction...

...Fantastic as these endearing oddballs may be, the world they live in is no never-never-land...

...But it wasn't time to get married then, so Terry is not the one I'm marrying...

...Justine castigates her own lack of tact or subtlety: "She never would let a quarrel wind up in its natural way...

...For all its incidental flashes of inspiration and comedy, Tyler's new novel gave me a sense of slackening, even of retreat...

...In Celestial Navigation a spinster who rooms in hapless Jeremy's house overcomes her inhibition and takes a step that permits the happy turn of events, yet can't bring herself to intervene again, thus lettingit fail...

...Here the eccentrics are only minor characters acting in small comic set pieces along the way, not moving spirits like James in Tin Can Tree or Morgan in Morgan's Passing, who spends not only his life but even his pseudo-death impersonating...

...He is as disappointed in his overachieving daughter heading toward Ivyland as in his underachieving son, a failing rock singer much like Drumstrings Casey, the anti-hero of A SlippingDown Life...

...The sexist slander becomes worse: Maggie makes an irresponsible escape, and then within minutes is pretending to search in her hopeless handbag for a map she doesn' t dare admit she has left at home...

...Maggie's campaign is Tyleresque, precipitating unexpected comedy...

...This is mostly a virtue, except that female subjugation is merely one of the monstrous social facts and threats of which Tyler has seemed virtually oblivious throughout her writing...

...We see Maggie also from Ira's painful point of view: "He loved her, but he couldn't stand how she refused to take life seriously...

...This may be Tyler's mischievous game...

...I loved Terry Simpson in our sophomore year—remember him...

...What she reveals is how rare and precious goodness is, in man or woman, how fragile its carriers...

...My satisfaction was partly in what we always find in Tyler—her sympathetic, funny, disclosing way of showing people who are typical and yet wildly individual...

...Meddling is by no means the ruling theme in Tyler's novels, however...

...At the reception something has happened too...

...She always had to be interfering...

...Maddening as Ira's withholding can be (it has crushed the development of his son), Tyler shows his life of quiet sacrifice, running his father's framing shop to support his inadequate sisters...

...can carry deep foreboding...

...And how someone of either sex can be an exploiter, or a victim, for reasons that are more complex than gender...

...Or if we are, we can wrest ourselves free any time we care to.' " True or false...

...She was always making clumsy, impetuous rushes toward nowhere in particular—side trips, random detours...

...She does know that when they make up a family, the change is qualitative, the family group becomes a force, sometimes malign...

...But Serena, the widow, has set her heart on this "nice touch," and Maggie can't let her old best friend down...

...With the unwilling Ira she carries out a scheme meant to end the separation of their son from his wife and retrieve the lost relationship with Leroy, the granddaughter...

...For a few brief minutes she takes us into his mind: "He was fifty years old and had never accomplished one single act of consequence...

...Actually, what Maggie is trying to get right on the day of this story is their current life...

...Not having sung for years, they are both appalled...

...They knew all the words straight through, which Maggie found surprising, because earlier she had forgotten what it was that makes a man a king...

...During one flashback in Breathing Lessons Maggie recalls the widow Serena as a highly practical bride, buying a wedding dress that could be dyed purple to wear later, and considering whether she could rent (like a bartender) a man to stand in for her unknown father...

...I must have been absent from school that day...

...Unequipped to manage in it, they can sometimes be saved by meeting the right unlikely person...

...Breathing Lessons makes it inescapable...

...Up to now Tyler has given us irresistible " idiosyncratic characters who amble about in Chekhovian fashion,' as a reviewer of The Clock Winder described them...

...In Breathing Lessons Maggie prevents Fiona's abortion at a clinic where patients are harassed by a mob of Right-to-Lifers, whose behavior and dubious propaganda show Tyler as close as she has ever come to taking a social position...

...She not only gets back into the car but starts putting pressure on him to make a surprise foray on their daughter-in-law Fiona in Cartwheel, Pennsylvania...

...The cards are in his pocket before the service begins, but when their turn comes he lets Maggie rise alone and quaver out the first word, "Love...

...Maggie and Ira find their way to a church in an unfamiliar Pennsylvania town for a funeral...

...Tyler's 10 earlier novels have told us so, delightfully and sadly...

...Breathing Lessons is mainly Maggie's story, but she is presented as a questionable heroine...

...I assumed a change in Maggie, a new strength to be her own woman...

...In a farcical scene where Tyler's humor is surprisingly labored, Maggie retrieves the car from the body shop that has just repaired the latest of her crumplings, and (distracted by a voice on a call-in radio show that she thinks is her daughter-inlaw's) promptly heads out into the path of a passing truck...

...When Maggie protests at her lack of romanticism about the groom Serena says calmly, "Of course I love him...

...Now that I have read the novel I am embarrassed...

...In Searching for Caleb In Coming Issues Barry Gewen on Albert Goldman's "The Lives of John Lennon1' Yehudah Mirsky on "The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitmenl in the Twentieth Century' Seiden Rodman on H.C...

...We feel a sense of irreparable loss from a quiet voice saying, "Oh...

...The program is to repeat the rather kooky long-ago wedding of the couple whom death has now parted...

...They had recently read The Accidental Tourist, laughing while taking in its message (running like a warm undercurrent through all the earlier works) that nobody can be too offbeat to win some discerning soul...

...Not all Tyler's effects come from hints and auguries...

...Yet Maggie is there for strictly personal reasons, preoccupied by the fibs she must tell to make sure her grandchild will be born...

...So perceptive is Tyler's ear that within their context inarticulate responses like "I see," "Not at all," or "Huh...

...The other part of my satisfaction was a bit naive...

...And indeed it may be...

...Of course, something has happened...

...The widow has surprised her old classmates with a home movie of them at the wedding...

...At the reception following the funeral we find Maggie and Ira gravitating back into their couple status (sensationally far back, erotically speaking) as if nothing had happened...

...But it involves a problem that is far from comic, one Tyler's characters have struggled with before: Do you dare to take action that affects the course of other people's lives...

...Adamant, he lays out asolitaire game on the seat of the pew...

...Within the limits she has set herself, watching ordinary people anyone might meet, she has also set a goal—the goal of all great writers— to show that even the most infuriating of humans, closely observed, from within and without, can become important, essential, precious...

...Durwood, a rejected beau from girlhood, who has already sung in a throbbing tenor, "Hold me close, hold me tight...

...Tyler permits a pause for reflection, then continues: "So there again, Serena had managed to color Maggie's view of things...

...Once he had planned to find a cure for some major disease and now he was framing petit point...

...This is an almost identical repeat of a scene in Searching for Caleb...

...She stops in a roadside grocery-café to work out her first solo menu, and is deciding between Ritz crackers and fig newtons when Ira comes in...

...Blind and lonely, she requires him to read aloud from her old diaries...

...In a few pages we came to know that high school class, from Sugar Tilghman, the Barley twins, and Jo Ann Dermott (she would read from Kahlil Gibran as she had 30 years before) to the widow Serena, who as a proud illegitimate child had "teetered on the edge of gaudy but had somehow brought it off...

...A few miles farther on, at a stop for a snack, to the distress of Ira, Maggie confides to the café waitress a detailed family history...

...She demonstrates this so well that she captures—yes, captivates —us within her smaller world...

...Ira is unmoved...

...Tyler presents a black in this novel, but only in one of her comic divertissements, and he is a sweetly subservient oldtimer with an IQ of 50...

...This near, his voice had a resonant sound...

...Maggie, seeing Ira as he was at 21, remembers how his stark silences seemed then ("so mysterious"), and marvels over the inadvertent (Tyleresque) way she captured him...

...Just as they begin recognizing 1950s high school friends they learn that they are expected to perform...

...She seemed to believe it was a sort of practice life, something she could afford to play around with as if offered second and third chances to get it right...

...Looking forward to her next novel with such anlicipation, have they been a little let down by Breathing Lessons...

...It opens, in fact, with a stale, statistically way-of f male chauvinist clich...

...Though she sometimes slips out of character and exposes the brain of her author, here Maggie is exactly what her husband calls her, a whifflehead...

...The readers who so quickly made Breathing Lessons a best seller must have expected some similar memorably loving hero...

...She allows her characters sudden rare conclusions, direct and sweeping...

...Robbins London's "1791: Mozart's Last Year' Justine tries to get the 17-year-old daughter to ride in the U-Haul truck with her father, whom the girl can't forgive for this restless move that is wrenching her away from her school only months before graduation...

...The lives of Tyler's characters, including the better-educated ones, are affected solely by other individuals...