Anne Tyler.

"People have always seemed funny and strange to me, and touching in unexpected ways. I can't shake off a sort of mist of irony that hangs over shake off a sort of mist of irony that hangs over whatever I see.... It just seems to me that even the most ordinary person, in real life, will turn the most ordinary person, in real life, will turn out to have something unusual at his center."

Anne Tyler, quoted in Washington Post, 10/22/03.

If Jane Austen were to cast her eye on 21st-century society, her observations might touch a nerve with contemporary novelist and short-story writer Anne Tyler. Author of the best-selling Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), the Pulitzer Prize--winning Breathing Lessons (1988), and more than a dozen other novels, Tyler explores the motives, conflicts, and aspirations of middle-class families. Like Austen, whom she cites as one of her favorite novelists, Tyler hones in on the age-old preoccupations of courtship, marriage, child rearing, and familial responsibility. These concerns play out at ordinary events--births, family dinners, road trips, and funerals--usually in Baltimore and its environs. Tyler broadened her reach in Digging to America (2006), which explores culture clash, identity, and belonging from the perspective of an American couple and an assimilated Iranian family. The story nonetheless still features the insular suburban characters and domestic dramas we have come to expect. "One doesn't go to Tyler for the shock of the new. One goes to her for the pull of the old, because her preoccupations are more in line with, say, George Eliot's than Don DeLillo's" (Katharine Whittemore, "Ordinary People," Atlantic Monthly, 5/01).

Despite a focus on family life, there is nothing small about Tyler's Baltimore world and her ordinary people's lives. Her marvelous creatures may be wilder, less traditional, and more dysfunctional than Austen's passionate characters, but they ring just as true today as they might have two centuries ago. As Tyler's grandparents, wives, bachelors, and teenagers approach an understanding of their lives and of each other, they exhibit moments of quiet desperation. "In my childhood I was trained to hold things in, you see," says aging patriarch Daniel Peck in Searching for Caleb (1975).

"But I thought I was holding them until a certain time. I assumed that someday, somewhere, I would again be given the opportunity to spend all that saved-up feeling. When will that be?"

Tyler spent much of her childhood in North Carolina, and she follows the southern tradition. She credits Eudora Welty as her literary inspiration: "Reading Eudora Welty when I was growing up showed me that very small things are often really larger than the large things" (New York Times, 5/8/77). Critics note the influence of Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, and William Faulkner as well. Tyler's novels, however, often lack the historical contexts that frame these southern writers' works. And, though quirky, her characters are not gothic, gritty, or alluring; her women are decisive and meddling, not vacillating and submissive, and her men, often repressed, are "accidental tourists" playing the roles of doctors, husbands, and even kidnappers. Instead of judging her imperfect creations, Tyler examines them with a cool, affectionate eye and guides them toward redemption and second chances--a recurring theme--as they search for ideal relationships.

Like many of the quietly eccentric personalities in her novels, Tyler had an unconventional upbringing. The only daughter and eldest of four children, Tyler was born on October 25, 1941, in Minneapolis. Her father was a chemist and her mother a social worker. During her childhood, her family, in search of a communal lifestyle, lived in a Quaker community in rural North Carolina. These years gave Tyler an appreciation of farming, crafts, carpentry, cooking, music, and books, and her eventual Southern literary flavor. When her family settled in Raleigh, Tyler attended her first formal school. She entered Duke University at age 16, where she studied with writer Reynolds Price, wrote her first short fiction, and won the Anne Flexner Award for creative writing twice. After graduating, she pursued a master's degree in Russian Studies at Columbia University, met Iranian psychiatrist Taghi Modarressi, whom she married in 1963, and started to publish her first short stories.

When her husband's visa expired, the couple moved to Montreal, where Tyler focused on writing. If Morning Ever Comes (1964) marked the first of her character-driven novels. The Tin Can Tree--and the birth of her first daughter, Tezh--followed a year later. In 1967, her second daughter, Mitra, was born. The family settled in Baltimore, the locale of many of Tyler's novels, in 1967. Throughout the 1970s, Tyler published five well-received novels, though none were commercial triumphs; her ninth, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), catapulted her to literary success. The following year Tyler was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The Accidental Tourist and Breathing Lessons made Tyler an American icon. Back When We Were Grown-Ups (2001), with its widow-protagonist, represented an attempt to lift her spirits after her husband died in 1997. Since then, the reclusive Tyler, who rarely gives face-to-face interviews or book tours, continues to mine Middle America's everyday moments and vast emotional wealth.

Deceptively "Plain Jane"

WHILE TYLER IS CONSIDERED one of America's most significant contemporary writers, her work is often overshadowed by her male contemporaries. Her modest themes--marriage, family relationships, society's misfits--seem middlebrow, somehow, to cynics. "While her fans revere her as a modern-day Jane Austen, her detractors regard her as an up-market Joanna Trollope," claims critic Lisa Allardice ("Accidental Celeb," Guardian Unlimited, 1/4/04). Chided as too sentimental, precious, simplistic, unhistorical, antifeminist, self-absorbed, shockingly unpolitically correct, and an implausible story plotter, Tyler prefers tradition over literary experimentation.

Underneath her repressed bachelors and dysfunctional teenagers, however, lie great emotion, psychological depth, and eternal optimism. Neither a "chick lit" writer nor exclusively a women's writer, Tyler charms both women and men, who perhaps find comfort in her characterizations of men and women searching for their identities. After all, it's not hard to feel well adjusted by comparison. John Updike, Nick Hornby, and Roddy Doyle count themselves among Tyler's fans. Her prose possesses grace and realism. Eudora Welty said about Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: "If I could have written the last sentence ... I'd have been happy the rest of my life." (We urge you to pick up the book.) If "Tyler is the Plain Jane of American fiction, both in style and subject matter," says Lisa Allardice, "it is this deceptive comeliness and innocence that appeals to her readers: she holds up a forgiving mirror to Middle America."

MAJOR WORKS

Searching for Caleb (1975)

Tyler admitted that although her sixth novel may not have been her best book, it was "the most fun to write. Each morning was like going to a party.... [I]f I could somehow arrange it so that for the rest of my life all I was doing was writing that book, I'd be delighted to do it" (Patricia Rowe Willrich, "Watching Through Windows: A Perspective on Anne Tyler, The Virginia Quarterly, 2005).

THE STORY: The Pecks have lived in Baltimore for generations, lorded over by the aging patriarch Daniel, whose half-brother, Caleb, walked out on his family in 1912 with only his fiddle in hand. Daniel, his fortuneteller granddaughter, Justine, and her restless husband, Duncan, set out in search of him. As they delve deep into their family's roots, they discover that they must reinvent their expectations of their relationships and lives.

"While etching with a fine, sharp wit the narrow-mindedness and pettishness of the Pecks, she lavishes on them a tenderness that lifts them above satire.... But at the center of Tyler's characters is a private, mysterious core which is left, wisely, inviolate. Ultimately this wisdom is what makes Tyler more than a fine craftsman of realistic novels." KATHA POLLITT, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, 1/3/75

"[Tyler] manages to be both celebratory and rueful, both ordinary and madcap, and sometimes even mildly bizarre.

... Basically what we hear, when we're hearing anything, is watered-down Welty, McCullers, O'Connor, or Faulkner." CAROL IANNONE, NATIONAL REVIEW, 9/1/89

THE BOTTOM LINE: A classic tale of family ties, personal choices, and the search for belonging.

Morgan's Passing (1980)

* NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST

Written with trademark humor and compassion, Morgan's Passing features another stock Tyler character--an antihero and inveterate imposter, a lost soul "who had gone to pieces, or maybe he'd always been in pieces; maybe he'd arrived unassembled."

THE STORY: Married, and with seven daughters, the eccentric Morgan Gower works at a hardware store in north Baltimore. As he reaches middle age, he realizes that he hasn't lived the life he imagined for himself. Then he meets a young, newly wed couple, plays doctor to their newborn baby, and discovers an obsessive life purpose.

"Morgan, like a novelist, wants to be everybody else in order to look at himself through innocent eyes, to be charmed. ... Miss Tyler, witty, civilized, curious, with her radar ears and her quill pen dipped on one page in acid and on the next in orange liqueur, is asking whether art is adequate to the impersonations life insists on, death absolves. She is a wonderful writer." JOHN LEONARD, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, 3/17/80

"Like a sentry or a detective, Anne Tyler seems to notice everything: the pale fluorescent gloom of laundromats, pockets filled with lint-covered jellybeans, the smell of crabcakes and coconut oil on a Delaware beach, grapy veins in the calves of middle-aged mothers. As a chronicler of domestic fuss, Tyler can be compared to John Updike." JAMES WOLCOTT, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, 4/3/80

THE BOTTOM LINE: A story about love, habits, obsessions, and finding one's life purpose.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)

* PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST; TIME MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF 1982; PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION FINALIST; NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST

Critics consider Tyler's ninth novel, which again portrays dysfunctional relationships between siblings and parents, husbands and wives, to be her watershed work. A bold narrative, told in flashbacks by different characters, distinguishes it from her earlier novels. Tyler herself called this commercial success her "eternal favorite."

THE STORY: In Baltimore's oddball Tull family, Pearl, an emotionally unstable matriarch, lies on her deathbed and recalls her husband's disappearance in 1944, her single motherhood, and her three children's troubled lives. Now grown, Cody, Jenny, and Ezra evaluate Pearl's attempt at reconciliation while they narrate their own bitter tales of family conflict. Only Ezra dreams of reuniting his family--for just one meal at his restaurant.

"Whatever problems you might have with your own will seem infinitely less after this moving read." FORBES, 11/21/83

"[The novel exhibits] the qualities that distinguish all her work and give it, at least potentially, a place in the canon of the South's better writing: honest and accurate presentation of scenes and people [and] a fine sense of form unobtrusively maintained." J. A. BRYANT JR., TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOUTHERN LITERATURE, 1997

"I think Tyler's comic gifts are uneven at best, but her gifts as a serious, moving chronicler of a certain kind of American family are supreme. She has written one masterpiece, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), which I love unreservedly." KATHARINE WHITTEMORE, ATLANTIC MONTHLY, 5/01

THE BOTTOM LINE: Considered to be among Tyler's best work for its multiple perspectives and psychological insight into one family's tensions.

The Accidental Tourist (1985)

* NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD; PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION FINALIST

Tyler claims that her most famous work was also the most difficult to write, in part because she hated to see one of her characters die. She also feared that the bossy Muriel would put readers off. In the end, Tyler grew to love the families and relationships she created.

THE STORY: Macon Leary writes a travel-guide series, called Accidental Tourist, for those who would rather stay home. Not surprisingly, the death of his 12-year-old son and his wife's departure leave him in a tailspin. Then he meets the brazen Muriel Pritchett, a dog trainer. As he forgoes his routines for an "accidental" relationship with her, he learns to reengage in life. "It's kind of heartening, isn't it," he says. "How most human beings do try."

"Miss Tyler shows, with a fine clarity, the mingling of misery and contentment in the daily lives of her families, remind us how alike--and yet distinct--happy and unhappy families can be. Muriel Pritchett is as appealing a woman as Miss Tyler has created; and upon the quiet Macon she lavishes the kind of intelligent consideration that he only intermittently gets from his own womenfolk." LARRY MCMURTRY, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, 9/8/85

"One of my favourite books is Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist, a comic novel which begins with a couple who've lost their child. What made it so electrifying was that you wanted to weep and laugh in the same book." NICK HORNBY, SUNDAY HERALD [GLASGOW], 5/29/05

THE BOTTOM LINE: Tyler's classic; an ultimately optimistic look at life's unpredictable paths.

THE MOVIE: 1988, starring William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, and Geena Davis, and directed by Lawrence Kasdan.

Breathing Lessons (1988)

* PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION

Breathing Lessons, Tyler's eleventh novel, takes place over one day, but chronicles 28 years of marriage. Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize, the novel disappointed some critics. Others called it her most accessible novel to date.

THE STORY: A 90-mile drive from Baltimore to a funeral in Pennsylvania gives scatterbrained, middle-aged Maggie Moran and her husband, Ira--complete opposites--the opportunity to examine their marriage. A few detours involving an old black man and their grandchild reveal their incompatibilities, disappointments, unmet expectations--and lasting love.

"The failure of this set piece, coupled with Maggie's ultimate failure to reunite the myopically self-centered couple, make 'breathing lessons' a far less resonant controlling metaphor than those in her best novels." ROBERT MCPHILLIPS, THE NATION, 11/7/88

"Sometimes powerful. At other times Breathing blows it, stirring up so much tiresome slapstick that one wonders if one has failed to register some Beckettian ain't-life-absurd statement. Or if the book just plain isn't funny." KATHARINE WHITTEMORE, ATLANTIC MONTHLY, 5/01

THE BOTTOM LINE: A tour de force that delves deep inside an ordinary mind--and an extraordinary marriage.

TV MOVIE: 1994, starring James Garner and Joanne Woodward, and directed by John Erman.

Saint Maybe (1991)

In her twelfth novel, Tyler addresses guilt and redemption in one middle-class family. Though Saint Maybe is less complex than The Accidental Tourist and less capricious than Breathing Lessons, it offers a sophisticated portrayal of Ian Bedloe and, once again, penetrating insight into how people unexpectedly affect each other.

THE STORY: The Bedloes are a seemingly normal Baltimore family. When disclosed secrets lead to the deaths of older brother Danny and his wife, the guilt-stricken younger brother, Ian, who holds himself responsible for the deaths, embarks on the path to atonement. Redemption entails taking care of his brother's orphaned children and liberating his soul at the Church of the Second Chance.

"In Saint Maybe, as in her other novels, Tyler dramatizes a debate about the pros and cons of family life. Is the family an anchor in the storm? ... Or do families become, not support systems, but burdens of guilt, leading to damaging sacrifices of personal freedom?" MARILYN GARDNER, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, 9/25/91

"Tyler has been accused of what might be called a squeamish streak, a certain daintiness when it comes to subjects like, say, sex and violence. As if to answer those critics or else to challenge herself to explore new territory, the first chapter of Saint Maybe is all about sex and violence.... The rest of the book is about what may be the toughest subject there is: religion." MADELEINE BLAIS, NEWSDAY, 9/17/91

"It has any number of Tyler virtues; it also has a more insistent quantity of Tyler defects..... [Ian's] muted spirits, justifiable as they are, mute the book.... And at the end, too many things come together too sweetly and tidily." RICHARD EDER, LOS ANGELES TIMES, 9/8/91

THE BOTTOM LINE: A heartbreaking examination of guilt and redemption.

Where to Start

Tyler, who rules cheerfully over the ordinary and familiar, writes stories almost all readers can all relate to. For a tale about family tensions and battles, start with DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT, Tyler's first best-selling novel and her own favorite. If you've ever gotten in a rut and wanted to break your routine, THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST, her best-known book, will show you the way--sort of. And BREATHING LESSONS depicts a 28-year-long marriage, in all its ups and downs.

Going Down to Tylertown

TYLER, WHO LIVES IN BALTIMORE, has colonized the entire city and its suburbs with quirky characters from 11 novels. "Baltimore has been essential to Tyler's fiction for three decades--surely she now has more legitimate claim to being the city's Boswell than even H. L. Mencken," says Jonathan Yardley (Washington Post, 10/22/03). In 1977, after already publishing seven books, Tyler admitted that "what it seems to me I'm doing is populating a town. Pretty soon it's going to be just full of lots of people I've made up" (New York Times, 5/8/77). Another ten books later, that's exactly what Tyler has done.

Her characters live all over town. Macon Leary of The Accidental Tourist and the Peck family in Searching for Caleb live in Baltimore's maple-lined, mansion-filled Roland Park, America's first planned suburban community. Muriel Pritchett from The Accidental Tourist, the Tulls from Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and Rebecca Davitch in Back When We Were Grownups reside in the more middle-class, ethnically diverse, and bohemian Charles Village, home to John Hopkins University. Baltimore also provides a testing ground for the mixing of individuals, families, and cultures. In The Amateur Marriage, Pauline, unfamiliar with Baltimore's Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood, meets her soon-to-be husband in his mother's grocery store. And in Digging to America, two families--one American, one Iranian-American--meet by chance at the Baltimore airport and discover over the years what it means to be American.

In populating Baltimore with her characters, Tyler has made the city her own--so much, in fact, that popular tourist guides often retrace her fictional locales. "Tourists wouldn't be scared to find themselves in an Anne Tyler neighborhood, with its mid-middle-class frame houses, its arthritic maples, its front porches decently painted but showing a little sag.... Not scared but probably lost," writes critic Richard Eder. "Why on earth would they be there? Perhaps taking a few hours from their downtown itinerary to visit the first cousins Mother had lost track of.... And resolve to keep in touch. Perhaps they will" (Los Angeles Times, 9/8/91).

Selected Other Works

* Discussed in Major Works

IF MORNING EVER COMES (1964) Ben Joe Hawkes, Tyler's typical misfit, feels responsible when he learns that his sister has left her husband and returned to the family. So he returns to his southern small town to make things right.

THE TIN CAN TREE (1965)

Six-year-old Janie Rose's accidental death allows the Pike family to examine their personal relationships, hidden demons, and love for each other.

A SLIPPING-DOWN LIFE (1970)

When shy teenager Evie Decker becomes enchanted with radio guitarist Drumstrings Casey, her entire life changes.

THE CLOCK WINDER (1972)

Recently widowed Pamela Emerson lives outside Baltimore with only a houseful of ticking clocks. Then she fires her handyman and hires Elizabeth, who becomes tragically involved with Pamela's sons.

CELESTIAL NAVIGATION (1974)

The awkward 38-year-old Jeremy Pauling spends his time creating collages of people in his family's Baltimore row house. His life takes a turn when he falls in love with one of his boarders and they "pretend" to marry.

* SEARCHING FOR CALEB (1975)

EARTHLY POSSESSIONS (1977)

Charlotte Emory's life changes when a trip to the bank turns into a hostage crisis--and an exciting, soul-searching adventure from Maryland to Florida.

* MORGAN'S PASSING (1980)

* DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT (1982)

* THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST (1985)

* BREATHING LESSONS (1988)

* SAINT MAYBE (1991)

TUMBLE TOWER (1993)

In this children's book, illustrated by Tyler's daughter, Mitra Modarressi, Princess Molly the Messy doesn't exactly fit in with her very neat family. But amid a flash flood, her messy room saves the day.

LADDER OF YEARS (1995)

At 40, Baltimorean Delia Grinstead, wearing only her swimsuit and beach robe, runs away from her husband and children. Over the course of a year, she starts to understand the woman she wants to become.

A PATCHWORK PLANET (1998)

Barnaby Gaitlin, from a family of "old" Baltimore, used to break into people's homes to read their mail. Now, after paying for his crimes, he works with senior citizens and tries to find stability in his messed-up life.

BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWNUPS (2001)

Middle-aged Rebecca Davitch revels in throwing parties in her 19th-century Baltimore row house. Then she starts to question whether she's turned into the wrong person--and wonders how to recover her true self.

THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE (2003)

Pauline and Michael, from different parts of Baltimore, seemed like the perfect couple when they met during World War II--but they never should have married. Complete opposites, they try to make sense of a marriage that takes decades to unravel. (*** 1/2 May/June 2004)

DIGGING TO AMERICA (2006)

Two sets of parents--one American, the other Iranian, each representing a slice of 21st-century American life--meet at the Baltimore airport as they await the adoption of two Korean infant girls. (**** SELECTION July/Aug 2006)

BY JESSICA TEISCH