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Summary
Summary
From the inimitable Anne Tyler, a rich and compelling novel about a mismatched marriage--and its consequences, spanning three generations. They seemed like the perfect couple--young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother's grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married. Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable. From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more fully into the complex entanglements of family life in this wise, embracing, and deeply perceptive novel.
Author Notes
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 25, 1941. She graduated from Duke University at the age of 19 and completed graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. Before becoming a full-time author, she worked as a librarian and bibliographer.
Her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964. Her other works include Saint Maybe, Back When We Were Grownups, Digging to America, Noah's Compass, The Beginner's Goodbye, A Spool of Blue Thread, and Vinegar Girl. She has won several awards including the PEN Faulkner Award in 1983 for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Accidental Tourist, and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons. The Accidental Tourist was adapted into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. In 2018 her title, Clock Dance, made the bestsellers list.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Because Tyler writes with scrupulous accuracy about muddled, unglamorous suburbanites, it is easy to underestimate her as a sort of Pyrex realist. Yes, Tyler intuitively understands the middle class's Norman Rockwell ideal, but she doesn't share it; rather, she has a masterful ability to make it bleed. Her latest novel delineates, in careful strokes, the 30-year marriage of Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay, and its dissolution. In December 1941 in St. Cassians, a mainly Eastern European conclave in Baltimore, 20-year-old Michael meets Pauline and is immediately smitten. They marry after Michael is discharged from the army, but their temperaments don't mix. For Michael, self-control is the greatest of virtues; for Pauline, expression is what makes us human. She is compulsively friendly, a bad hider of emotions, selfish in her generosity ("my homeless man") and generous in her selfishness. At Pauline's urging, the two move to the suburbs, where they raise three children, George, Karen and Lindy. Lindy runs away in 1960 and never comes back-although in 1968, Pauline and Michael retrieve Pagan, Lindy's three-year-old, from her San Francisco landlady while Lindy detoxes in a rehab community that her parents aren't allowed to enter. Michael and Pauline got married at a time when the common wisdom, expressed by Pauline's mother, was that "marriages were like fruit trees.... Those trees with different kinds of branches grafted onto the trunks. After a time, they meld, they grow together, and... if you tried to separate them you would cause a fatal wound." They live into an era in which the accumulated incompatibilities of marriage end, logically, in divorce. For Michael, who leaves Pauline on their 30th anniversary, divorce is redemption. For Pauline, the divorce is, at first, a tragedy; gradually, separation becomes a habit. A lesser novelist would take moral sides, using this story to make a didactic point. Tyler is much more concerned with the fine art of human survival in changing circumstances. The range and power of this novel should not only please Tyler's immense readership but also awaken us to the collective excellency of her career. (Jan.) Forecast: Expect the usual blockbuster sales-there will be a first printing of 300,000. This is also likely to become one of Tyler's strongest backlist titles. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The attack on Pearl Harbor serves as the catalyst for Tyler's sixteenth novel by propelling Pauline, bleeding from a minor wound sustained in the fervor of a spontaneous patriotic parade, into the humble family grocery run by handsome and reserved young Michael and his embittered widow mother. An outsider to this tightly knit, Polish Catholic Baltimore neighborhood, Pauline is pretty, impulsive, and touchy, and although she and the far more deliberate and reticent Michael fall instantly in love, they are also immediately at odds. They marry precipitously, move into the cramped apartment above the store with his mother, rapidly produce three children, and consistently make each other miserable. Tyler's strength resides in her penetrating psychological portraits and delight in mundane details, and these gifts are evident in the novel's promising opening scenes. But the usually adept Tyler ends up setting 30 years of tedious marital unhappiness and domestic tragedy against a distressingly superficial and bland accounting of the rise of suburbia and the flowering of hippie culture. Her observations about how abruptly even the most boring life can go wrong, and about the fact that we are all amateurs in our first marriages, are poignant, however, and may be enough to satisfy readers who seek safe and comfy novels. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2003 Booklist
Guardian Review
Anne Tyler's 17th novel begins on Pearl Harbor Day 1941 and ends 60 years later, after the World Trade Center attack. These days of infamy bracket tectonic shifts in American society; but Tyler uses them to frame the story of Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay, who meet in the excitement of an impromptu patriotic parade: "All six of the Szapp boys are enlisting, haven't you heard? And a couple of their friends besides. They've got this banner - Watch out, Japs! Here come the Szapps! - and everyone's seeing them off." Swept up by this naive fervour, Pauline inspires or dares Michael to enlist; they too are swept up in romance and start the long march in a hasty marriage: "They were such a perfect couple. They were taking their first steps on the amazing journey of marriage . . ." Ironic innocence during an era when "starter" marriages were doomed to be finishers. Tyler is obviously commenting on that perennial, the American loss of innocence, and the novel is also a beautifully recreated social history of the disappearance of an immigrant generation - here Polish Catholics in Baltimore - into the American mainstream. By its end, the last of the Szapps has died of a stroke and Michael's neighbourhood grocery store has been taken over by the supermarket chain World O'Food. "Somewhere along the way, people in this country had developed the assumption that life should be varyingly logical and just . . . no allowance for tragedies that couldn't be prevented by folic acid or side air bags or FAA- approved safety seats." In 10 artfully constructed chapters, Tyler links her characters' lives with this history, and suggests that the Antons' miserable marriage is a symptom of an age. Michael believes "that all of them, all those young marrieds of the war, had started out in equal ignorance". But somehow the others had become "wise and seasoned", leaving only he and Pauline "as inexperienced as ever - the last couple left in the amateurs' parade". Tyler has a magical ability to get inside her characters, to make us sympathise and care for them even in their extremes of eccentricity, foolishness, stubbornness and clumsiness. Both men and women reading this novel will wincingly recognise something of themselves in the mismatched gender extremes of Michael and Pauline - he orderly, emotionally awkward, disliking change; she impulsive, imaginative, demanding intimacy. When the break finally comes, Pauline is the one who suffers most, although she has seemed the stronger within the marriage; and her forced dwindling into an ex- wife is even more poignant because of Tyler's understatement. "We were just . . . unskilled," Michael concludes; but being an amateur can cause as much pain as being a villain. Tyler is certainly no amateur. Yet somehow this novel never achieves the emotional or intellectual impact of her best work. As she multiplies the crises in the lives of her protagonists, each one seems to be a failed opportunity for depth of vision. In 1959, the Antons' eldest daughter, Lindy, runs away from home to follow her favourite writers - "Jack Kerook and Caymus", as Michael calls them. We are in lost-daughter territory, as in Carol Shields's Unless , in which a family is torn apart by the symbolic flight of its most sensitive child. But soon, the Antons get used to Lindy's absence, and Tyler doesn't pursue its meaning or consequences. Then in 1968, Lindy surfaces in San Francisco with a little boy, Pagan. Michael and Pauline fly to her rescue, but she has entered a retreat run by a guru named Becoming. Tyler fans will recognise another of her fascinating alternative religions; but disappointingly, rather than developing into an analogue of the unforgettable Church of the Second Chance in Tyler's masterpiece, Saint Maybe, the retreat gets short shrift, Becoming vanishes from the plot and Lindy's spiritual rebirth is aborted. The Antons are left to raise Lindy's child, another theme with enormous possibility. Where does Pagan come from? Why won't he speak? How will they deal with this new responsibility? But Tyler drops these plot-lines as soon as she introduces them. The marriage briefly revives; Pauline shows an impressive ability to cope, and soon Pagan is a slangy teenager who wants to play guitar. In short, the powerful themes of transformation that usually energise Tyler's writing seem muted and banal, and when the Antons finally split up, the end comes with a whimper. In the final pages, Tyler brings the story full circle, but with a sentimental imaginary reunion. Perhaps, like Lindy, Tyler herself is getting bored with Baltimore and needs to move on. Elaine Showalter's books include Inventing Herself (Picador). To order The Amateur Marriage for pounds 14.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-tyler.1 [Anne Tyler]'s 17th novel begins on Pearl Harbor Day 1941 and ends 60 years later, after the World Trade Center attack. These days of infamy bracket tectonic shifts in American society; but Tyler uses them to frame the story of Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay, who meet in the excitement of an impromptu patriotic parade: "All six of the Szapp boys are enlisting, haven't you heard? And a couple of their friends besides. They've got this banner - Watch out, Japs! Here come the Szapps! - and everyone's seeing them off." Swept up by this naive fervour, Pauline inspires or dares Michael to enlist; they too are swept up in romance and start the long march in a hasty marriage: "They were such a perfect couple. They were taking their first steps on the amazing journey of marriage . . ." Ironic innocence during an era when "starter" marriages were doomed to be finishers. In short, the powerful themes of transformation that usually energise Tyler's writing seem muted and banal, and when the Antons finally split up, the end comes with a whimper. In the final pages, Tyler brings the story full circle, but with a sentimental imaginary reunion. Perhaps, like [Lindy], Tyler herself is getting bored with Baltimore and needs to move on. - Elaine Showalter.
Kirkus Review
Painfully accurate and painfully funny as ever, Tyler's 16th novel (Back When We Were Grownups, 2001, etc.) traces the stormy union of two people who love but can't stand each other. Pauline bursts into Michael Anton's grocery store in December 1941, a bloody handkerchief pressed to the temple she wounded while impulsively jumping off a Baltimore streetcar to join an enlistment parade. In no time flat, she's persuaded Michael to join up, and they're married right after he's discharged. Three children arrive in short order, but it's not long before Michael is wondering, "Was it possible to dislike your own wife?" They're simply not good match: "Pauline tumbled through life helter-skelter while Michael proceeded deliberately . . . . Pauline believed that marriage was an interweaving of souls, while Michael viewed it as two people traveling side by side but separately." She sweeps him off to the suburbs and eventually gets him to move the family grocery store out there too; Michael always ends up doing what she wants while quietly resenting her moods, her enthusiasms, her recklessness. Pauline in turn is infuriated by "his rigidity, his caution, his literal-mindedness . . . his stodginess in bed, his magical ability to make her seem hysterical." Tyler beautifully delineates both spouses' perspectives throughout her episodic narrative, which drops in on the highlights of the Anton's 30-year marriage and the 20-year aftermath of their divorce. (A good technique, except for the terrible mistake of having the story's most vivid character die offstage.) Flashes of tenderness and genuine love serve to underscore the sad fact that they simply aren't suited, and cogent portraits of their children reveal the emotional damage they inflicted. Alive as always to life's messy ambiguities, Tyler declines to reach a final conclusion about this "amateur marriage," closing with a lovely image of Pauline's face lighting up with joy as her husband approaches--but it's just in Michael's imagination. So smart, so sensitive, so readable and engaging. Is it churlish to suggest that an author obviously at the peak of her powers should broaden her horizons and push herself a little harder the next time out? Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Having wed too fast during World War II, the mismatched Pauline and Michael must put aside their differences to raise their grandson, neglected by his feckless teenaged mom in San Francisco. With a 300,000-copy first printing. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1. Common Knowledge Anyone in the neighborhood could tell you how Michael and Pauline first met. It happened on a Monday afternoon early in December of 1941. St. Cassian was its usual poky self that day--a street of narrow East Baltimore row houses, carefully kept little homes intermingled with shops no bigger than small parlors. The Golka twins, identically kerchiefed, compared cake rouges through the window of Sweda's Drugs. Mrs. Pozniak stepped out of the hardware store with a tiny brown paper bag that jingled. Mr. Kostka's Model-B Ford puttered past, followed by a stranger's sleekly swishing Chrysler Airstream and then by Ernie Moskowicz on the butcher's battered delivery bike. In Anton's Grocery--a dim, cram-packed cubbyhole with an L-shaped wooden counter and shelves that reached the low ceiling--Michael's mother wrapped two tins of peas for Mrs. Brunek. She tied them up tightly and handed them over without a smile, without a "Come back soon" or a "Nice to see you." (Mrs. Anton had had a hard life.) One of Mrs. Brunek's boys--Carl? Paul? Peter? they all looked so much alike--pressed his nose to the glass of the penny-candy display. A floorboard creaked near the cereals, but that was just the bones of the elderly building settling deeper into the ground. Michael was shelving Woodbury's soap bars behind the longer, left-hand section of the counter. He was twenty at the time, a tall young man in ill-fitting clothes, his hair very black and cut too short, his face a shade too thin, with that dark kind of whiskers that always showed no matter how often he shaved. He was stacking the soap in a pyramid, a base of five topped by four, topped by three . . . although his mother had announced, more than once, that she preferred a more compact, less creative arrangement. Then, tinkle, tinkle! and wham! and what seemed at first glance a torrent of young women exploded through the door. They brought a gust of cold air with them and the smell of auto exhaust. "Help us!" Wanda Bryk shrilled. Her best friend, Katie Vilna, had her arm around an unfamiliar girl in a red coat, and another girl pressed a handkerchief to the red-coated girl's right temple. "She's been hurt! She needs first aid!" Wanda cried. Michael stopped his shelving. Mrs. Brunek clapped a hand to her cheek, and Carl or Paul or Peter drew in a whistle of a breath. But Mrs. Anton did not so much as blink. "Why bring her here?" she asked. "Take her to the drugstore." "The drugstore's closed," Katie told her. "Closed?" "It says so on the door. Mr. Sweda's joined the Coast Guard." "He's done what?" The girl in the red coat was very pretty, despite the trickle of blood running past one ear. She was taller than the two neighborhood girls but slender, more slightly built, with a leafy cap of dark-blond hair and an upper lip that rose in two little points so sharp they might have been drawn with a pen. Michael came out from behind the counter to take a closer look at her. "What happened?" he asked her--only her, gazing at her intently. "Get her a Band-Aid! Get iodine!" Wanda Bryk commanded. She had gone through grade school with Michael. She seemed to feel she could boss him around. The girl said, "I jumped off a streetcar." Her voice was low and husky, a shock after Wanda's thin vio- lin notes. Her eyes were the purple-blue color of pansies. Michael swallowed. "A parade's begun on Dubrowski Street," Katie was telling the others. "All six of the Szapp boys are enlisting, haven't you heard? And a couple of their friends besides. They've got this banner--'Watch out, Japs! Here come the Szapps!'--and everyone's seeing them off. They've gathered such a crowd that the traffic can't hardly get through. So Pauline here--she was heading home from work; places are closing early--what does she do? Jumps off a speeding streetcar to join in." The streetcar couldn't have been speeding all that fast, if traffic was clogged, but nobody pointed that out. Mrs. Brunek gave a sympathetic murmur. Carl or Paul or Peter said, "Can I go, Mama? Can I? Can I go watch the parade?" "I just thought we should try and support our boys," Pauline told Michael. He swallowed again. He said, "Well, of course." "You're not going to help our boys any knocking yourself silly," the girl with the handkerchief said. From her tolerant tone, you could see that she and Pauline were friends, although she was less attractive--a brown-haired girl with a calm expression and eyebrows so long and level that she seemed lacking in emotion. "We think she hit her head against a lamppost," Wanda said, "but nobody could be sure in all the fuss. She landed in our laps, just about, with Anna here a ways behind her. I said, 'Jeepers! Are you okay?' Well, somebody had to do something; we couldn't just let her bleed to death. Don't you people have Band-Aids?" "This place is not a pharmacy," Mrs. Anton said. And then, pursuing an obvious connection, "Whatever got into Nick Sweda? He must be thirty-five if he's a day!" Michael, meanwhile, had turned away from Pauline to join his mother behind the counter--the shorter, end section of the counter where the cash register stood. He bent down, briefly disappeared, and emerged with a cigar box. "Bandages," he explained. Not Band-Aids, but old-fashioned cotton batting rolled in dark-blue tissue the exact shade of Pauline's eyes, and a spool of white adhesive tape, and an oxblood-colored bottle of iodine. Wanda stepped forward to take them; but no, Michael unrolled the cotton himself and tore a wad from one corner. He soaked the wad with iodine and came back to stand in front of Pauline. "Let me see," he said. There was a reverent, alert silence, as if everyone understood that this moment was significant--even the girl with the handkerchief, the one Wanda had called Anna, although Anna could not have known that Michael Anton was ordinarily the most reserved boy in the parish. She removed the handkerchief from Pauline's temple. Michael pried away a petal of Pauline's hair and started dabbing with the cotton wad. Pauline held very still. The wound, it seemed, was a two-inch red line, long but not deep, already closing. "Ah," Mrs. Brunek said. "No need for stitches." "We can't be sure of that!" Wanda cried, unwilling to let go of the drama. But Michael said, "She'll be fine," and he tore off a new wad of cotton. He plastered it to Pauline's temple with a crisscross of adhesive tape. Now she looked like a fight victim in a comic strip. As if she knew that, she laughed. It turned out she had a dimple in each cheek. "Thanks very much," she told him. "Come and watch the parade with us." He said, "All right." Just that easily. "Can I come too?" the Brunek boy asked. "Can I, Mama? Please?" Mrs. Brunek said, "Ssh." "But who will help with the store?" Mrs. Anton asked Michael. As if he hadn't heard her, he turned to take his jacket from the coat tree in the corner. It was a schoolboy kind of jacket--a big, rough plaid in shades of gray and charcoal. He shrugged himself into it, leaving it unbuttoned. "Ready?" he asked the girls. The others watched after him--his mother and Mrs. Brunek, and Carl or Paul or Peter, and little old Miss Pelowski, who chanced to be approaching just as Michael and the four girls came barreling out the door. "What . . . ?" Miss Pelowski asked. "What on earth . . . ? Where . . . ?" Michael didn't even slow down. He was halfway up the block now, with three girls trailing him and a fourth one at his side. She clung to the crook of his left arm and skimmed along next to him in her brilliant red coat. Even then, Miss Pelowski said later, she had known that he was a goner. "Parade" was too formal a word, really, for the commotion on Dubrowski Street. It was true that several dozen young men were walking down the center of the pavement, but they were still in civilian clothes and they made no attempt to keep in step. The older of John Piazy's sons wore John's sailor cap from the Great War. Another boy, name unknown, had flung a regulation Army blanket around his shoulders like a cape. It was a shabby, straggly, unkempt little regiment, their faces chapped, their noses running in the cold. Even so, people were enthusiastic. They waved homemade signs and American flags and the front page of the Baltimore Sun. They cheered at speeches--any speeches, any rousing phrases shouted over their heads. "You'll be home by New Year's, boys!" a man in earmuffs called, and "New Year's Day! Hurray!" zigzagged through the crowd. When Michael Anton showed up with four girls, everybody assumed he was enlisting too. "Go get 'em, Michael!" someone shouted. Though John Piazy's wife said, "Ah, no. It would be the death of his mother, poor soul, with all she's had to suffer." One of the four girls, the one in red, asked, "Will you be going, Michael?" An outsider, she was, but very easy on the eyes. The red of her coat brought out the natural glow of her skin, and a bandage on her temple made her look madcap and rakish. No wonder Michael gave her a long, considering stare before he spoke. "Well," he said finally, and then he kind of hitched up his shoulders. "Well, naturally I will be!" he said. A ragged cheer rang out from everyone standing nearby, and another of the girls--Wanda Bryk, in fact--pushed him forward until he had merged with the young men in the street. Leo Kazmerow walked on his left; the four girls scurried along the sidewalk on his right. "We love you, Michael!" Wanda cried, and Katie Vilna called, "Come back soon!" as if he were embarking for the trenches that very instant. Then Michael was forgotten. He was swept away, and other young men replaced him: Davey Witt, Joe Dobek, Joey Serge. "You go show those Japs what we're made of!" Davey's father was shouting. For after all, a man was saying, who could tell when they'd have another chance to get even over Poland? An old woman was crying. John Piazy was telling everybody that neither one of his sons knew the meaning of the word "fear." And several people were starting in on the where-were-you-when-you-heard discussion. One had not heard till that morning; he'd been burying his mother. One had heard first thing, the first announcement on the radio, but had dismissed it as another Orson Welles hoax. And one, a woman, had been soaking in the bathtub when her husband knocked on the door. "You're never going to believe this," he'd called. "I just sat there," she said. "I just sat and sat. I sat until the water got cold." Wanda Bryk returned with Katie Vilna and the brown-haired girl, but not the girl in red. The girl in red had vanished. It seemed she'd marched off to war with Michael Anton, somebody said. They did all notice--those in the crowd who knew Michael. It was enough of a surprise so they noticed, and remarked to each other, and remembered for some time afterward. Word got out, the next day, that Leo Kazmerow had been rejected because he was color-blind. Color-blind! people said. What did color have to do with fighting for your country? Unless maybe he couldn't recognize the color of someone's uniform. If he was aiming his gun in battle, say. But everyone agreed that there were ways to get around that. Put him on a ship! Sit him behind a cannon and show him where to shoot! This conversation took place in Anton's Grocery. Mrs. Anton was answering the phone, but as soon as she hung up, someone asked, "And what's the news of Michael, Mrs. Anton?" "News?" she said. Excerpted from The Amateur Marriage: A Novel by Anne Tyler All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
