The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 17 June 2007
by Anne Tyler
Maggie and Ira Moran are off to a funeral for Maggie's best friend's husband. At the beginning of the day, Maggie picks up their old car at the shop, only to have another fender-bender the moment she hits the street again. Her distracted and yet hopeful way in the world is a major thread throughout the book, all of which takes place during this one short road trip from Baltimore to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania. Ira is more taciturn, and the couple have two kids, a precocious girl heading to college on a scholarship, and a sullen young man, whose short attention span has left him adrift. In a short summary, it would be difficult to encapsulate all that this sprawling but fast-moving novel entails. Maggie and Ira have an imperfect marriage, and Tyler brilliantly captures the small connections that maintain a relationship. Maggie and Ira may not really know each other in a complete sense, but they are connected and they feel comfortable with each other. There are numerous flashbacks on their journey, to their courtship in the 1950s and to their kids growing up. There are side trips and accidents, too. Tyler conveys so many of the complexities of relationships and even of time over the course of a single day. It is a deft and engrossing performance. One may liken Tyler's novel to those of John Updike. They are on similar ground, the everyday small but crucial uglinesses and beauties that punctuate our lives. They are even on the similar physical territory of suburban Pennsylvania roads. And they both earned Pulitzers for their work. Tyler's take, however, is lighter in tone than Updike's. She doesn't have the dark sense of the ironically bizarre that Updike likes to play with. What she does have is gentle insight that is well-rendered and authentic. Recommended.
(For this book, Tyler was awarded the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.)