The Luminous Characters of Novelist Anne Tyler

By Howard Cincotta
USINFO Special Correspondent

The Luminous Characters of Anne Tyler

Novelist John Updike once wrote memorably that fellow writer Anne Tyler "is not merely good, she is wickedly good."

For more than 40 years, in meticulous "wickedly good" prose, Tyler has written quietly luminous novels that examine the nuances of character and the foibles of American family life. Her many novels may not provide broad-scale social commentary, but they offer extraordinary insight into the lives of ordinary, largely middle-class individuals struggling to balance the search for individuality with the iron ties of obligation to and love for their families.

Her books celebrate the heroism and failures of small-scale domestic life. Though her characters often are described as eccentric, quirky or wounded, such terms do not capture the warm generosity, the dispassionate, yet caring, attitude that Tyler takes toward the characters in all her books.

Family is the preoccupation in virtually all her work. In 1979, Tyler observed, "My interest in families is a result of my curiosity about how people endure together -- adapt, adjust, grate against each other, give up, and start over again in the morning -- and families are simply the most convenient vehicle for studying this."

Tyler's latest novel, Digging to America, is no exception, but it does introduce a new ethnic element to her fictional American world. In a beautifully etched scene that captures the swirling, multicultural aspect of the United States today, the novel opens with two families -- the Donaldsons and the Iranian-born Yazdans -- waiting at the airport in Baltimore, Maryland, for the arrival of their newly adopted infant daughters from Korea.

Tyler creates a set of wonderfully idiosyncratic characters in both families and explores the inevitable cultural confusions and tensions over the next few years as both families celebrate the annual "Arrival Day" of their daughters. Yet, the dominant character in the novel is Maryam Yazdan, an immigrant turned American citizen, a widow and grandmother to one newly adopted child, who is caught between two worlds and tries to hold herself aloof from the near gravitational demands of her son's family as well as the sometimes over-eager embrace of the Donaldson clan.

Tyler was born in 1941 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to a pacifist Quaker family that moved frequently before settling in a remote North Carolina community; she graduated from Duke University, where she majored in Russian. In 1963, she married Iranian-born child psychiatrist Taghi Modarressi and launched her writing career.

She met her new husband's extended family on a monthlong trip to Iran after they married -- a memory that obviously shaped her depiction of the Yazdan family in Digging to America many years later:

"At the time we married, he had over 300 close relatives, all intricately involved with each other," Tyler said in a recent e-mail interview. "They were so much fun to watch that I thought I would like to invent a similar family for my book."

While she obviously draws upon personal experience, Tyler insists that none of her characters are autobiographical.  "All of my pleasure in writing comes from inventing another world -- a believable world, I hope, so that readers think it's true, but an entirely imaginary one."  (See interview with Tyler.)

Tyler lives in Baltimore, which provides the setting for most of her novels. Her husband died in 1997; she has two grown daughters and two grandchildren.

Book by book, eschewing any personal publicity, Anne Tyler has built a powerful literary reputation, and the intense loyalty of an international readership that has likened her -- not without cause--to a modern-day Jane Austen.

In addition to Digging to America, her work includes If Morning Ever Comes (1964), The Tin Can Tree (1965), A Slipping Down Life (1970), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction), The Accidental Tourist (1985, National Book Critics Circle Award, made into an Oscar winning movie starring William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, and Geena Davis), and Breathing Lessons (1988, which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize).

ENDS

(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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