A disturbing absence of disturbance
Anita Brookner
THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE by Anne Tyler Chatto,iI6.99, pp. 306, ISBN 0701177349 Annc Tyler has written 15 excellent novels — this is her 16th — which proceed according to a formula she has made her own: romantic comedy of a prelapsarian kind, set in the suburbs of Baltimore in the blameless days of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. before greater disappointments set in to trouble the American consciousness.
This was the age of the best Hollywood films, in which a scatty, zesty heroine wore down the defences of the man on whom she had set her sights. In the best of these novels, The Accidental Tourist, the scatty zesty etc. heroine, a dog-trainer by occupation, wins the heart of the temporarily bereft man by appearing on the same flight that he is obliged to take in a white outfit which he has time to note is entirely unsuitable for a long journey before abandoning all prejudice and all sense, just as she intended. In these affecting novels it is the man who is needy, on his own, careworn and innocent, and the woman who briskly brings him back to life. This is far worthier than would be possible in current thinking, and has the added virtue of adumbrating a notion of fitness, in the sense that we are rooting for both of them, and that neither has lost caste or is acting out of character in the course of their unlikely love affair.
The evidence of the present novel suggests that Anne Tyler is having to try a little harder to win over her readers, although the same untroubled confidence prevails. Michael and Pauline meet and fall in love as teenagers, when she erupts into his mother's downtown grocery store demanding a bandage for her cut forehead. The fact that there is a drugstore close by is an indication of her purpose, as his mother sourly observes, but the deed is done. He is captivated by her red coat, an equally persuasive clue, and does not object when she encourages him to enlist in the army, from which, in due course, he is invalided out with a limp.
One might wish for a touch of asperity here, and indeed the opening chapter is excruciatingly sweet, almost parodic, and the Panglossian outlook less than convincing. Fortunately things get worse. Character tells. The amusingly dippy girl turns into a fractious and unreliable wife, the husband into a cautious, narrowchested bore. In a single remarkable paragraph Pauline lists everything she hates about her husband, all without a single note of tragedy being struck. The marriage lasts for 30 years of unresolved conflicts and moves jumpily through the births of three children, so that we are propelled from one decade to another without, it has to be said, much sense of history. There are two surprises: the disappearance of a daughter, later traced to a hippy commune in San Francisco, and the divorce of the parents, who should have been sobered by this experience. Even-handedly they pick up the pieces, remove their daughter's baby, bring him home to Baltimore, and go on much as before, the father to running his now expanded grocery store, the mother to her still haphazard household management. There is no hint that lives have been undone and will need to be remade.
Although the details are as beguiling as we have come to expect, the lack of substance is a little worrying. These people seem to live very comfortably, yet it is not clear how they manage to pay for it all, particularly when Michael, hitherto restrained husband and father, moves into his own apartment, complete with outdoor swimming pool and a choice selection of artistic reproductions on every wall. Nor is it entirely clear how such equanimity is sustained by either party. We read that Pauline is frequently in tears, but it was she who told her husband to leave in nothing more than a momentary fit of temper. Life continues in the most enviable way possible; plans are made, anniversaries celebrated. The unknown and unforeseen infant grandson settles down without so much as a backward glance to his absconding mother.
A moment of reflection might seem to be in order at this point, something more in tune with the spirit of the age, but it is precisely the spirit of another age that is the matrix of this novel, just as it was of its 15 predecessors, where it seemed more natural. When Michael meets and falls in love with another woman (a woman who wears 'slacks') we know that nothing unduly explicit will be recorded, for this novel, like all the others, is asexual, hovering between extreme youth and later middle age without anything dramatic happening in between. As always it makes compulsive and effortless reading, as if that new house were where we all wanted to live, that roast chicken and baked potatoes our favourite meal, the rudimentary music school the designated place of instruction for our offspring. The momentum of the early love affair still has the power to move the story along, but this time without completely convincing the reader that the behaviour described is normal. The fact that no harm is ever registered becomes incongruous, so much so that one is forced to search for reasons to account for a slight feeling of disappointment.
Mine came when I realised that what I was reading was very like the novels of Carol Shields, an amalgam of Larry's Party and Unless. There is the same domestic intimacy, the same gentility, the same decent man, the same sparky wife, the same aberrant daughter, the same lack of disturbance, the same assurance of safety. It is this last quality that has kept readers faithful, even addicted, and it is not entirely misleading or inauthentic. If it has little to do with the harsher truths that most people are called upon to confront it bestows a pleasant assumption of viability on the characters, as if all crises could be surmounted and no fissures revealed in one's own good faith.
Tyler's books come garlanded with praise from hard men like Nick Hornby and Roddy Doyle, who seem, to judge by their reviews and quoted opinions, exceptionally fond, as if this version of the world were in every way superior to the real thing, and the characters there merely to persuade one of its desirability. Both Shields and Tyler are alike in the easy accomplishment of their respective styles, which seem to be entirely natural, even guileless, in their absence of rhetoric, their homeliness, the conscientious and convincing detail. Of the two it is perhaps Shields who is the better writer, the one whom an untimely death prevented from reaching an arguably more mature formulation. But it was Tyler who set the pace and who may continue to do so. It will be interesting to see what other writers, not necessarily of the same disposition, will make of this inheritance.
The Amateur Marriage is a companionable novel, whose slight air of doggedness will be willingly discounted by Anne Tyler's many readers. Perhaps it was a mistake to let these perennial youngsters grow old: the final chapters are frankly disappointing. She is an unassuming writer, unassuming but not naive. Her style — straightforward, kindly — is still valid. No author with such qualities could fail to bring about, yet again, a novel of such warm familiarity.
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