ANNE TYLER, THE BEGINNER’S GOODBYE
I have long been a fan of Anne Tyler. She is a master of character, writing with intelligence, compassion and humor about ordinary lives. She says
My reason for writing is to live other lives, and I do that by burrowing deeper and deeper, quarter inch by quarter inch, into the center of those lives.
Her characters are quirky, but everyone, if sufficiently known, is quirky. No one is boring. This is not to say that some people don’t bore us, especially if they won’t shut up, but if we could hear their thoughts, know their histories and habits, their joys and sorrows, we would find them unique and fascinating.
Though Tyler takes us deep inside her characters, the experience is not claustrophobic, because she achieves a perfect balance between action and response. (I’m currently reading a writer who writes one sentence of dialog or action followed by a paragraph of the character thinking about it. I’m choking.)
Many of Tyler’s books deal with marriage and family, the ties of time and affection that can bind people together despite conflicting expectations and desires, and radically different world views. She writes about the daily, often mundane incidents of ordinary lives – walking a dog, preparing a meal.
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The incidents are peculiar, yet feel entirely realistic. In Accidental Tourist, Macon washes his clothes each night by stirring them around in the bathtub while he takes a shower. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the darkest Tyler book and probably my favorite, Pearl, in a rage at her daughter’s messy room, drags all the clothes out of the closet and dumps the dresser drawers out on the floor. One of the funniest scenes I have ever read is at the beginning of Breathing Lessons, another favorite, when Maggie and Ira, her husband of twenty-eight years, are driving to a distant funeral and talking at cross-purposes – she wants to focus on their son’s relationship with his ex-wife, while he wants to understand how Maggie smashed up their car just as she exited a body shop.
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Anne Tyler is an accessible literary writer. Her writing never intrudes, or distracts us from the characters and story. There is no self-indulgence here, no ‘Look at me, I’m writing’ pyrotechnics, just a smooth flow of language that carries us deeper and deeper into the characters’ lives. Still, because I write, I tend to notice and analyze a felicitous phrase, and from many years back I remember her description of a woman washing dishes as she watches her children out the kitchen window, “her careless ease with dishes, ceaseless care with children.’ I marvel at that – I’m sure that rhetoric has a name for such word play.
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For years I devoured each of Anne Tyler’s novels when it appeared, and then for a while I lost track of her. I recently found her again, and read The Beginner’s Goodbye.
Aaron Woolcott’s wife Dorothy was killed when a tree fell on their house and crushed her. Now, according to Aaron, she has come back. The novel is about healing from a loved one’s death. That description could fit a self-help book, but here there are no platitudes, no encouraging advice. It is a vivid, comical tale of loss and recovery.
Aaron begins his story with, “The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how people reacted.” Immediately I accepted his point of view, though for most of us the strangest thing would be not the reaction but the return.
She was unique among women, Dorothy. She was one of a kind. Lord, she left a hole behind. I felt as if I’d been erased, as if I’d been ripped in two. Then I looked down the street and saw her standing on the sidewalk.
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Dorothy keeps reappearing – at the farmers’ market, in the street, outside their house. He is eager to see and talk with her, and looks for her everywhere. Aaron believes both that she is ‘real’ and that it is all in his head.
I had first tried to do without her – to.’get over’ my loss, ‘find closure,’ ‘move on,’ all those ridiculous phrases people use when they’re urging you to endure the unendurable. But eventually she had faced the fact that we simply missed each other too much. She had given in and returned. That’s what I liked to believe.
Aaron’s account of their life together is filled with his love and grief, his memories, his regrets. He argues with her each time she reappears, and concludes that although he loved her, their marriage was unhappy, or at least difficult.
He reviews their clumsy courtship, when he was eager as a puppy and she was unaware they were courting, and goes on to explain the many ways they were at odds with each other. He loved her for her lack of feminine charm – her frumpiness, her failure to nurture him – but also resented it. He was blind to her hesitant attempts to take care of him, to make herself more attractive. When they married she diffidently offered to wear a white dress -“I could do that. I wouldn’t mind.” and went on to describe it in detail, including a bouquet. And he responded “We’re neither of us the type for that, thank heaven.”
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Other people – his colleagues at the vanity press where he is an editor, his neighbor, his sister – try to offer comfort and companionship, but he fends them off, much the same way he fended Dorothy off. Eventually he does ‘find closure, get over it, and move on,’ though he says
It’s like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It’s still there, but the sharpest edges are muffled, sort of. Then, every now and then, I lift a corner of the blanket, just to check, and -whoa! Like a knife!
Lately I’ve been preoccupied with loss, dreading not my own death, but the death of people I love. This is probably a function of my age. You needn’t be 65, or morbidly obsessed, however, to enjoy The Beginner’s Goodbye. If you like fascinating, maddening characters, and you enjoy laughing out loud when you read, do try Anne Tyler.
I’m a big Anne Tyler fan