State of a Union
SMITH, SARAH HARRISON
State of a Union The Amateur Marriage By Anne Tyler Knopf. 320 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Sarah Harrison Smith Freelance writer and critic Anne Tyler's latest novel of marital discontent...
...They may love their children but they take very little joy in each other...
...Our daughter Lindy...
...When the couple quarrel in the nave just before their wedding, Tyler tells us the story as we would hear it if we were waiting in the church pews: "Wanda came back and sat down, out of breath, rustling and bustling importantly...
...They were such a perfect couple...
...That comes as a relief...
...Tyler resists the urge to glamorize, and instead takes us deeper into the almost infinite variety of experiences that emanate from a marriage...
...The child'spitilessjudgment guts some complacency from Tyler's philosophy...
...The Golka twins, identically kerchiefed, compared cake rouges through the window of Sweda's Drugs...
...It's a period that now seems familiar, thanks to Hollywood's obsession with the apparent moral certainties of World War II...
...Isn't that interesting...
...says all they do is fight...
...But Tyler has her pencil sharpened for detail, so even though her portrait of the place is not surprising, it is vivid: "St...
...He is stacking cans of food in inefficient pyramids when Pauline, a pretty blond girl in a dashing red coat and hat is bustled into the shop by two friends...
...It is easy to believe, after reading a number of her books in fairly short order, that she views marriage as an unsatisfactory and lonely arrangement, yet still preferable to being alone...
...She and Michael are indeed opposites—she impulsive, emotional, quick-witted, and he methodical, conservative, pedantic...
...Michael supplies a bandage and the two fall in love...
...Michael assumed an expression of courteous attention...
...Astutely, the author acknowledges this, suggesting the clichés of wartime imposed a false sense of her characters, too...
...The rage the two incite in each other pales alongside the growing threat of a new adversary, time...
...When Pauline and Michael visit the epicenter of hippie San Francisco, they find themselves negotiating for control of one of their children with a benign brotherhood that has gone into the rehab business...
...In this house, all are free of labels,' the man told him...
...What is it?' the women asked, leaning forward...
...While that is not quite true of Pauline and Michael, their relationship does illustrate once more Tyler's profoundly ambivalent view of married life...
...such a different style of person from her, so set in his ways, won't budge....' '"Always does what...
...In the case of Pauline and Michael, however, more than their own emotions are at stake, and we can't help seeing their children's lives as a reflection of their parents' choices...
...And didn't everyone agree...
...The cultural references of the '40s seemed ersatz and, more important, distanced the reader from an intimate view of Michael and Pauline's relationship...
...The man tilted his head...
...Well, she was brought in about three days ago...
...Says she doesn't know what she was thinking...
...A few mocking references to mother-daughter outfits, meat loaf Orientale, and Formica-topped "modern" furniture notwithstanding, Tyler treats the decade largely as a contemporary period...
...Cassian was its usual pokey self that day—a street of narrow East Baltimore row houses, carefully kept little homes intermingled with shops no bigger than small parlors...
...She's about yay high and she's got more or less my coloring...
...Excuse me?' '"Family names, given names___The trappings of our old lives are cast off as we move forward...
...This polarity is common to Tyler's married protagonists, who often leave each other for a period and then return, newly committed to the union...
...Wait, I didn't catch that.'" Michael and Pauline nevertheless marry, and events move the story rapidly into the 1950s...
...On the day war breaks out 20-year old Michael Anton is working in the grocery store run by his widowed mother...
...Now when Pauline felt frustrated with Michael, "she gave a kind of mental blink and persevered with her original vision of him: He was the romance she had been waiting for all her life...
...What is rare for Tyler is the 60-year chronological span of The Amateur Marriage...
...The facts of their courtship are described as if seen by an inquisitive neighbor...
...The storybook vision does not match Tyler's carefully observant depiction of the couple...
...Michael and Pauline are both troubled by the question of whether their marriage was a mistake, and at moments it seems Tyler is attempting to answer that question...
...The radio was playing 'I'll Never Smile Again' and the War was raging in Europe and the world was trying to tear them apart, but in the end they would prevail...
...She'scut her head after jumping from a streetcar to cheer on an impromptu parade of boys volunteering to fight...
...he said...
...Through her comes a third view of the marriage...
...With three children and a livein mother-in-law, Pauline's life rocks sickeningly on the unstable foundation of her marriage...
...though I can't say for certain what style of hair—' "'Serenity,' someone said...
...and both of them hell on your children...
...always so unsocial and...
...Besides, the close perspective of Tyler's view suggests that any judgments, however passionate, are transient and unreliable...
...The almost unbearably poignant estrangement of a child, for instance, is presented here in the context of many decades...
...She was staying home to wait for him...
...Linnet,' Michael said...
...She has not abandoned humor, she integrates it in amore satisfactory way...
...Whether describing the sequence of events and impulses that might lead a child to persist in a lie to her parents, or following the stream of an old man's thoughts as he goes on a doctor-mandated brisk walk, his reflections punctuated by the words his limping gait appears to enunciate, "Don't know, but I think so," Tyler seems both generous and accurate...
...Tyler has a long, eventful story to tell, but she never outpaces herself...
...Serge asked from the far end...
...Nowhere is this more evident than in her success at depicting the inner lives of the very young and the old...
...The effect feels masterfully lifelike...
...Although its suburban setting, modestly scaled focus on a single family, and uncomplicated language make this an unpretentious novel (admittedly the same could be said ?? Madame Bovary), one sometimes feels Tyler has the sympathy and omniscience of George Eliot...
...says he never wants to go anyplace and...
...Tyler's refusal to wholly endorse or condemn the marriage cannot ameliorate the end result she reveals: Harm has been done...
...Ultimately, she declines to pronounce...
...Reviewed by Sarah Harrison Smith Freelance writer and critic Anne Tyler's latest novel of marital discontent begins in a small Polish neighborhood transformed by the news of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor...
...As she describes it upon her return, one parent was like ice, the other like glass, "two oddly similar substances...
...They would each rather be married to someone more like themselves...
...Pauline had changed her mind.' "'Had what...
...She has set aside much of the self-conscious whimsy that marked her earlier work (cutely-named catering companies, entrepreneurs in the dog walking business...
...Each crisis, each conversation is both lightened by such unexpected humor and darkened by legitimate emotional weight...
...Esthetically, Tyler's writing is at its best in this book...
...Never wants to go where?' Mrs...
...believe you have our daughter here.' "There was a pause...
...If one feels a desire for something more, it must spring from an escapist wish for novels to whisk us away from the quotidian realities of life...
...The angry teenager leaves home during the '60s and returns only after one of her parents dies...
...Desperate with anxiety, Michael finds his inquiries are waylaid by the group's obsession with nomenclature...
...It allows her to encompass a far broader spectrum of experiences...
...I believe she, urn, freaked out...
...So young, so attractive, so starcrossed, so tragic ! He was leaving to fight for his country...
Vol. 86 • November 2003 • No. 6
