Welcome to my Study Site celebrating novels of Anne Tyler:
Biographical information, more biodata, various sources, her themes, critics
 
Searching for Caleb
 
Breathing Lessons
 
The Accidental Tourist
 
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
 
Saint Maybe
 
Ladder of Years
 
Preview of "Patchwork"
Creative quotations from Anne Tyler
Net info about Anne Tyler
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/atyler.htm
http://www.greenwood.com/books/BookDetail.asp?dept_id=1&sku=GR0249&imprintID
When we were grownups review
 
Anne Tyler's novels:
- share three major features: Baltimore settings, life events, and everyday characters
- feature a key theme: "ordinary families with extraordinary problems".
 
 Michelle Lum sssay on Family Instability in Tyler's novels
 
A outline for an end of contract seminar reporting your reading of Anne Tyler
 
1. Who is Anne Tyler? biographical details/achievements
 
2. What are her themes/pre-occupations/interests?
 
3. How does she treat these issues? How are her novels distinctive?
 
4. Describe some of her notable characters.Read some selected passages and say why you chose
them.
 
5. What you learnt from this reading contract? Perhaps record:
  • New knowledge.
  • Tips for writing skills.
  • New understandings/feelings
  • Record your level of enjoyment.
 
6. Overall evaluation/impression. Recommendations?
 
To do this contract, start and maintain a reading journal to bring to the weekly meetings where
you would record interesting insights, new vocabulary, impressions he gleaned
It need not be an entry per chapter but one per four or five at least
Ask questions about Anne Tyler's own personal issues being worked out in the novels
Are the characters chess pieces of her own heart?
 
 
Notes on Searching for Caleb (1976)
 
Initial reactions: "the most challenging read I've had"
not the usual structured text set in courses
"a plot that flows from the heart"
not the subject matter but the style, a non-linear plot
its emotional structure: mixtures of past and present, memory and event.
strong theme of isolation: "peckiness of it all"
family identity in the search
Was finding Caleb an anticlimax?
Was the search a therapy for the family? a worthwhile process although the result was
separation
Caleb a deliberate outsider to the family as was Meg marrying away tests of belonging to the
Pecks: family unity as a reality or an ideal?
 
Tyler's concerns for family people, family events, family traditions.
She is a modern writer understanding modern people - realistic writing
Her overall optimism.
 
Survey plot, setting, structure/style, vocabulary, and themes.
A serendipitious phrase "Her focus of action is the turmoil of emotions"
Her "broken" style is a challenge to readers.
 
 
Notes to report on Breathing Lessons (1989)
 
Focus on page 182 where the title is contextualised.
Brainstorm alternative titles for this novel considering the content matter and themes
Work through my worksheet, considering my selections from the text and deciding on
characteristics typical of Tyler in them e.g., humour, realism, juxtaposing perceptions,
seemingly irrelevant details, role of emotion.
Consider the theme of ordinariness, "unvaryingness" 158.
A novel celebrating ordinary people?
Note the sentence on page 156 about Ira's envy of jolly, noisy families is seed for later novels as
overall Tyler is studying family cultures. .
Note the different personality types Tyler represents.
Consider Disappointment as a theme some receive in reading.
Hypothesise on the eventual ending of the novel, what issues need to be resolved and what
relationships healed.
Was Maggie a fool to rescue Fiona from the abortion clinic and bring her home?
What is the significance of the cradle and the soap box for Fiona?
Tyler hides Maggie from our criticism yet most of the novel is about her.
Discuss Ira's character and his point of view on events and characters.
The novel appeals for its human foibles, and Maggie's belief in love and family.
The ending is typical 20th C because it is more like real life.
Role of the passing of time in this novel.
Role of memory: events trigger memories which explain why people act the way they do.
To understand the setting, just get out a map of Baltimore and trace their journey.
Word meanings: pliant, lackadaisical, Kahal Gibran.
Is Jesse self centred? How well does he get on with his mother?
Posit posible meanings for the title. Suggest other titles like: Learning to Live again.
Does Tyler believe in love?
Was it really Fiona on the talk back show? And if so, why would she deny it to Maggie?
Read my handout with 22 extracts for discussion.
Overall. we find that Tyler excels at: Conversations in cars
  • place of enforced intimacy
  • conversations with teenager children - free of distractions - phone, other people, etc. e.g.,

Maggie and Ira's journey is very revealing of character.

Worksheet on this novel

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Notes on The Accidental Tourist (1985)
 
Notes from a student's Reading Journal:
Descriptions of Macon, the central character 53 "standoffish self" 155 upholstered 142 "kernel
of a man" rituals, traditionalist, compulsive unlikeably? a character caught in a time warp
For discussion: Is Tyler's character a fictional construct too far removed from a reality?
 
Word meanings: ossified, petrified, fossilised
Did he like Julian? analogous relationships of author and publisher
A typical Tyler theme: "real families" p. 206.
 
Is Tyler critical of her society? 152 the salesman with the truck images -a vignette
A keen observer and ear for conversations. Novelists as social commentators.
This is a journey through a pre 1985 Baltimore society
Not many landmarks to tie it to a particular period - thus universality.
 
Theme and plot follows the cycle of grief stages: denial, pain, idealisation, transference. Refer
handout, Worden Grief Counselling and Grief Therapy Tavistock 1982.
 
Finding themes:
ordinariness is interesting.
Is this novel about Macon or our society?
His perceptions, views, his point of view, his life, his setting.
It's not about a generation gap (What if Ethan had had body piercing?).
It is about how exciting society is, her interest in people, their stories and choices
Tyler a realist and an optimistic novel
Intertextual links:
comparing marriages: Maggie and Ira and Macon and Sarah, Macon and Muriel
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Notes on Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
 
Handouts (related pages) available:
 
"Dinner" is a novel about Pearl - her insecurity, distrust of love, sudden tantrums, unpredictability, "our mother was a witch" power of parent over children.
 
N.B.Strange chapter headings are picked up in the chapters.
 
1. "The traditional notion of Family assumes that blood binds strongly, and that those bonds are natural and instinctive." Discuss.
2. "Family love-bonds are like muscles: they atrophy without use, they tear with misuse and like most other living things, they wither in the dark." ("Happy Families" by Nigel Krauth in Australian Book Review Feb/Mar 1990 pp.24-28). Discuss.
 
Themes
Are faults handed on to the next generation? Becky recovering from poor parenting:
  • Cody - salesman
  • Ezra - cook
  • Jenny - paediatrician
  • Ezra a Christ figure? (giving constantly; no menu but discerning & serving what people need suffered betrayal by Cody who took the only girl he ever loved.
  • January 20, 1990 1:53 PM
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Notes on Anne Tyler's Saint Maybe (1991)
 
Structure
Using the Dinner formula again, Tyler uses different chapters to offer different points of view
(a la Faulker's As I Lay Dying):
Ch 1 Airmail Bowling Ball (improbable mental image 11) what brought Danny & Lucy together
Ch 2 Thomas and Agatha -The department of reality: "Agatha seemed to see things so clearly"55
Ch 3 Ian's guilt: "The man who forgot how to fly" =
Ch 4 Famous rainbows Thomas & Agatha's story ; title 152
Ch 5 People who don't know the answers Doug Bedloe
Ch 6 Sample Rains Good Works, Ian and the Church
Ch 7 Organized marriage
Ch 8 I should never tell you anything
Ch 9 The flooded sewing box
Ch 10 Recovering from the hearts-of-palm flu
 
NOTES
Agatha developed as a character people are suspicious of - people react with narrowed eyes.
Note the sustained point of view: "their mother" 62-3
 
Exploring American religion
Ian's rebirth ("born again stuff ") Church of the Second Chance Reverend Emmett (an Elmer
Gantry with all his hyprocrisy the little bottle and Bee's taking exception to the sugar rule: Ian
has brainwashed the boy Thomas now!)
 
Young people's lives
Ian willing to risk all: drop his prospects at Pennsylvania, start a new career, take on
responsibilities for the children through his (quite unnecessary) guilt for Danny's death.
"I don't believe this. I do not believe it. No matter how long I've been a mother, it seems my
children can still come up with something new and unexpected to do to me." 127
"He wondered if there was any event, any at all, so tragic that could jolt him out of this odious
habit of observing his own reaction to it." 92.
"Not just guilt but racking anguish over something impulsively done that could not be
undone?"102
 
Notable scenes:
 
a. What it is to be a child: 115
 
b. Christmas motif 110 a Tyler favourite: "Remember Christmas in the old days?" burying the dead
(the family buries its own a la Grapes of Wrath) "This is probably not even legal anyhow" 170
Doug's emptiness in the face of the event. Ian's prayer. " he relied on someone's else's
knowledge of what to do" contains the Chapter 5 title
 
c. Ch 4 family secrets: "You told our father's name though" 150 Agatha to Thomas "Daphne was
the only true Bedloe" 139.
 
The church in this novel
 
Notes on Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years (1995)
Characters
Delia (Cordelia F. Grindstead 122)
son Ramsay
husband Sam
sisters Linda and Eliza
employer Zeke Pomfret (132)
town of Bay Borough (137)
neighbours there Nat and Binky and new baby
title explained 193
a gay person mentioned first time in a Tyler novel 137
Suzie's accusations 293.
 
Report on Reading:"Baltimore": The World of Anne Tyler
 

Title

Published

Chief Characters

Rating

Theme

Searching for Caleb

1976

Justine

.

.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

1982
Pearl & Ezra
Cody , Jenny

.

.

The Accidental Tourist

1985

Macon

.

.

Breathing Lessons

1988

Maggie

.

.
copyright G. Smith 1997 Revised 24/3/00, 7/5/00.
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