A Professional Writer Tackles The Amateur Marriage
By Rawlins McKinney March 25, 2004 Issue

Anne Tyler once commented that all relationships are flawed. Her readers have come to expect incompatibility in her novels. The family conflict is a recurring theme in her sixteen novels.

In her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes (1964), a young man returns home to deal with family pressures while trying to decide how he will relate to his ex-girlfriend. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), a wife is abandoned and left alone to rear three children on her own. In the Accidental Tourist (1985), Macon and Sarah Leary, scarred by grief after their 12-year-old son's senseless murder (he was shot by a holdup man in a Burger Bonanza), are losing their marriage. In Saint Maybe (1991), her protagonist, stricken with guilt over the death of his older brother, raises three children unrelated to him by blood. The Ladder of Years (1995) is about a middle-aged woman who runs away from her husband and children and takes on a new life. Back When We Were Grownups (2001) begins, "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered that she had turned into the wrong person."

Her latest novel, The Amateur Marriage, like her Breathing Lessons (1988), is a story of a marriage of two completely different personalities. There the similarity ends. The marriage in Breathing Lessons is a happy one. The marriage in The Amateur Marriage is a disaster.

In early December1941 Michael Anton is working in his widowed mother’s cubbyhole of a grocery store in the Polish neighborhood of St. Cassian in east Baltimore. What seems to him a torrent of local girls bursts into the store. In their midst is a stranger, a girl in a red coat who is bleeding from her forehead. She is Pauline Barclay, who banged her head on a lamppost when, in her enthusiasm to join a patriotic parade, she jumped off a moving trolley car. Michael applies a makeshift bandage and Pauline invites him to go with them to the parade. He does and ends up making a commitment to enlist, an act more inspired by his desire to impress Pauline than patriotism.

Michael hates the Army and his resentment grows daily. The other men shun him and one of them “accidentally” shoots him in the butt during a training exercise. He is discharged and returns to Baltimore to marry Pauline.

The Amateur Marriage takes us on the Antons’ life journey from 1941 to 2001. Tyler avoids what could have been a plodding and overlong tale by writing ten chapters covering segments scattered throughout the sixty years. All are from Michael or Pauline’s point of view except for one each from two of their three children. Each chapter cumulatively confirms what we suspect from the beginning. This marriage won’t work, isn’t working and didn’t work. Michael is dull, methodical and self-centered. Pauline is outgoing, flighty and self-centered. The one common trait is the bullet that kills the marriage. Pauline is almost a no-show at their wedding. Less than fifty pages into the book Michael wonders if it was impossible to like your own wife. At their 30th wedding anniversary gathering Michael and Pauline appall their children by fondly reminiscing about the fights they have had over the years.

Anne Tyler is one of the few novelists who can write a literary novel that can be successful in the popular fiction market. There is no need for a dictionary at the ready. But don’t be deceived by the simplicity of her words. She is a wordsmith whose clarity draws the reader into the tale. We feel for the characters although we may be pissed off by what they do. We may not like them especially, but we care about what happens to them. Michael and Pauline are basically good people. As Tyler said in a recent New York Times interview, "While I was casting about for my next book idea, I realized that what interests me most is very different characters grating their edges together. And surely the best way to show that is an unhappy marriage — the kind where there's not a right person and a wrong person, but just two good people who are bad for each other. I suspect that marriage is like parenthood: every last one of us is an amateur at it, and Michael's only mistake was thinking that he and Pauline were alone."
Tyler has said that her fondest hope for any of her novels is that readers will feel, after finishing it, that for a while they have actually stepped inside another person's life and come to feel related to that person. She has achieved this goal with†The Amateur Marriage.

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