Welcome, little strangers
Caroline Moore
DIGGING TO AMERICA by Anne Tyler Chatto, £16.99, pp. 277, ISBN 070118034X ✆ £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Every time I pick up the latest novel by Anne Tyler, I wonder whether she is quite as good as her fans, of which I am one, like to think. Is she, in fact, no more than the Thinking Woman’s Good Holiday Read?
No more than that! many readers will exclaim (and perhaps, like Henry Tilney, add that men ‘read nearly as many as women’): only a thoroughly readable book that doesn’t insult your intelligence! Even outside the airport bookshop, we are all grateful to find such a treasure.
But there are a lot of readable books out there of the sort recommended by the Richard and Judy Book Club (no sneer at all intended: their choice encompasses some excellent works); and the question is why Anne Tyler should stand out.
For some readers, of course, she does not: some find her too middlebrow to be firstrate. There is a bolus of undigested intellectual snobbery in that formulation; but if you think that middlebrow fiction is largely middle-class, about ‘relationships’, and traditional in form, Tyler’s novels will, on the surface, fit the bill. They are mostly set in the suburbs of Baltimore, where a quiet cancer is more likely to get you than an axe-wielding madman, and revolve around extended family gatherings, where bickering is more the norm than incest. There is nothing tricky, self-referential or obviously experimental about them. How safe or even dull that makes them sound!
Of course, big issues do not in themselves make a fine book. Many thoroughly middlebrow novels thrive on them. Jodi Picoult’s stonking emotional blockbuster, My Sister’s Keeper, for example, is an investigation of the ethics of creating a designer child as a donor to save a sick sibling: it is a serious topic and makes, indeed, a pageturning read, but one that is neither morally nor psychologically subtle. It is powerful, but not surprising.
This is where Anne Tyler triumphs. Her writing is full of unobtrusive surprises: a wit that is wonderfully flexible, alive to incongruities. But she specialises in small-scale twists, subtle delights that are often difficult to recall in sufficient detail to enable one to explain why her writing is so good. I rediscover her with each new novel.
With Digging to America, however, I wondered, to start with, whether Tyler was straying too far out of her usual territory, into the realm of obviousness. Her novels have, of course, often circled around themes and issues involving moral identity. Can you escape from being the person life has made you, or is your true life the one you are living; are you in control of your life, or are you caught in its familial fabric; how far can you save, or ruin, your children? But her fiction usually teases obliquely at these conundrums; in Digging for America, there is the threat that the issues in the novel — themes of identity, family and belonging — might become too overt.
The novel is constructed, as so often in Tyler, around a series of family gatherings. We first meet the two families who form the cast of characters on 15 Friday 1997, in Baltimore airport. An exuberant American family, holding a ‘flotilla of silvery balloons printed with IT’S A GIRL’, wielding ‘at least half a dozen’ video-cameras, and wearing laminated badges proclaiming MOM, DAD, GRANDPA, GRANDMA (twice) and COUSIN, are crammed behind Pier 4. This confident capitalising labels the genial Donaldson family, who have turned up in force to welcome the arrival of Brad and Bitsy Donaldson’s baby, adopted from Korea. Hidden behind their massed bonhomie, there is a smaller, quieter family, also waiting for a Korean baby: a ‘youngish couple, foreign-looking, olive-skinned’, Sami and Ziba Yazdun, and Sami’s Iranian-born mother, Maryam, slim and self-contained.
The babies arrive: chunky Jin-ho goes to the Donaldsons; ‘sallow and pinched’ little Sooki to the Yazduns. It is Bitsy Donaldson, kind-hearted and interfering, with her ‘aggressive’ lack of make-up and selfrighteously healthy child-rearing theories, who makes contact and brings the two families together for annual celebrations of The Arrival.
An excellent set-up, offering wonderful scope for intercultural misunderstandings and misapprehensions: for a time, indeed, I wondered whether it would not prove almost too broad a path for Tyler. The differences between the Donaldsons and the Yazduns might so easily have become formulaic: we guess from the beginning that the Donaldsons, determined to celebrate their daughter’s Korean ‘heritage’, will keep her Korean name, while the more culturally insecure Yazduns will rename Sooki as Susan. And the undoubted interest readers will feel in the parallel progress of the infants might easily have nudged the narrative towards soap opera.
But Tyler balances her novel perfectly. Jinho and Susan do not, in fact, become the centre of interest, though we do glimpse life through their eyes. We do, predictably, discover that Jin-ho grows up to dislike the scratchy-hemmed Korean costume she is forced into at parties, and wants to be called Jo; what one would not have predicted is that this comic come-uppance is unbearably sad. We may have smiled, earlier, at Bitsy’s ‘homespun’ clothes, but when Jin-ho hates her adopted mother’s ‘knobby’ toes poking from her sandals, it is quietly but deeply shocking.
This is because Bitsy resists formulation: our perceptions of her shift. At first, she seems brimming with self-confidence, laying down the law about sugar-free drinks and cloth diapers. Child-rearing, like giving parties, allows endless opportunities for oneupmanship, and for crises of confidence; moral superiority seems to be Bitsy’s forte. ‘Even though she tended to be right,’ her husband reflects, he ‘could see that there were times when people wished they disagreed with her. Maybe global warming was not so bad after all! he could hear them thinking. Maybe world peace was less desirable than they had imagined!’ But Bitsy is convincingly ‘insecure’ beneath her forcefulness. Her slightly domineering party-giving becomes increasingly manic as her child-care theories founder on the implacable will of her second adopted child. One of the comic highlights of the book is the desperate ‘Binky party’ she throws, even in the wake of a hurricane, to celebrate the binning of her second daughter’s last dummy — or, more precisely, her daughter’s last 48 pacifiers, which are to be released on helium balloons into the sky.
Tyler is superbly alive to the complexities of emotion thrown up by the clash of cultures. The Donaldsons, heavy-footedly determined not to trample on cultural sensitivities, are never more deeply patronising to the Yazduns than when they are being sincerely appreciative of their Iranian culture; the younger Yazduns, sincerely emulous of the American way of life, mix admiration with an undertow of gentle resentment. Sami’s mother, Maryam, however, resists assimilation, superior and aloof. Her selfcontainment is both admirable and obstinately self-defeating. With another novelist, one might be surprised to find the widowed grandmother absorbing so much narrative attention; but Tyler is always alert to the dramas of ‘unregarded age’.
Digging for America is another superb novel, warm-hearted and funny, but bruised by frustration. In Tyler’s vision of the world, we cannot dig to America, cannot remake ourselves, or others, by willing it. Yet the fact that our free will is so bounded — we cannot escape from family, upbringing and nationality — is what makes us belong to the human race. Freedom would be belonging nowhere, and intolerable loneliness.
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