Digging to America: No Shovel Required

By Rawlins McKinney June 29, 2006 Issue

Anne Tyler has done it again. You would think that after 16 novels she would run out of ideas that put ordinary characters into unique and sometimes absurd situations. Her 17th, Digging to America, shows that this Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s imagination is still very much on the loose.

Adoption of foreign orphans, while a wonderful and life-changing event for the families involved, has pretty much become commonplace in America. Tyler revs up what could have been a mundane event by using it as catalyst to ensnare two disparate families in an improbable but enduring relationship.

The story opens one August evening in 1997 at the Baltimore airport. The airport is nearly deserted except for the waiting area for the arriving flight from San Francisco. A gigantic baby shower seems to be in progress. All this hullabaloo is to welcome an adopted five-month-old Korean orphan, Jin-Ho, to her American family. Assorted relatives, all sporting nametags such as Grandma, Granddad, Aunt and Cousin, accompany new parents Bitsy and Brad Donaldson.

The celebrating crowd is hushed when another Korean baby deplanes after Jin-Ho. It is Sooki, who is greeted only by her new parents, Sami and Ziba Yazdan, and Sami’s mother, Maryam. Two weeks later, Bitsy calls Ziba to see how things are going. It’s the beginning of a bond uniting the Donaldsons and Yazduns as the two families rear the little girls in very different ways.

On the surface Brad and Bitsy are a typical American couple in their early 40s. They strive for political correctness and are up on the latest trends in child rearing. They keep the Korean name for their child instead of giving her an American one. Bitsy is a stay-at-home Mom. Sami and Ziba are first generation Iranian-Americans. They change their daughter’s name from Sooki to Susan. Much to Bitsy’s disapproval, Ziba works outside their home two days a week.

Tyler wastes no time in throwing these two families into what I would consider an off-the-wall situation—a leaf-raking party at Brad and Bitsy’s house. Maybe this is an old custom in Baltimore and other parts of America but it’s something I never encountered in Alabama. Then there’s the annual celebration of the arrival of the two girls, the Arrival Party, another of Bitsy’s instigations. Videos of the airport celebration are shown after a rousing rendition of “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain”, the only “arrival” song that Bitsy can think of.

These gatherings usually include most of the aunts, uncles, cousins and of course the grandparents on both sides. Tyler brings the reader to the party. The clashes and contrasts of the two cultures are tempered by subtle revelations that people have similar problems and pleasures, regardless of their origins.

The author spreads the point of view among several of the characters, including one chapter from Jin-Ho’s perspective. However, this story ultimately belongs to two of the grandparents, Sami’s mother, Maryam, and Bitsy’s father, Dave. When Dave’s wife dies of cancer between the first and second Arrival Day, his grief is numbing. “He thought, why, this is just unbearable. He thought, I should have been able to practice on someone less important first. I don’t know how to do this.” Removing her voice from the answering machine “seemed an act of violence” so he does not erase it.

Maryam’s character is more complex. Born in Iran, she was “the most Westernized of young women, the most free-thinking and forward-looking.” Although she was enrolled in the University of Teheran, she spent more time on political activities than in the classroom. She was arrested but was quickly set free thanks to an uncle’s influence. Her family knew they had to get her out of the country, so they arranged for her to meet a friend’s son, a pathologist now living in America. It was technically an arranged marriage, but it’s clear that it would not have happened if Maryam had not wanted it to happen.

Maryam never looked at America as the promised land and threatened to return to Iran a couple of times early in her marriage. Her husband died when Sami was small and she decided to stay although she never felt that she was an American.

After Dave’s wife dies, you think you know what’s coming. Will this exotic foreigner and the plain, ordinary American widower get together? Or are they oil and water? Maybe, maybe not. If Tyler’s tale were to end where you think it is going, Digging to America would be a shorter book. Don’t speculate, just relax and enjoy the ride.

Add Digging to America to the long list of this beloved author’s remarkable successes.

Digging to America, 277 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, available at booksellers and libraries.

(Top)

More Book Reviews

Copyright © The Beachcomber, Inc. 2003 - 2008. All rights reserved.