Anne Tyler and the Art of the Middlebrow

As I closed the covers of Anne Tyler's new novel Digging to America, I found myself hard-pressed to think of another writer who's achieved as much success as she has to so little effect in literary circles. Here is a best-selling writer who's won the Pulitzer Prize, is a member of the American Academy of Letters, whose every new novel is treated as an event by the New York Times, and yet... Can you imagine a young writer of literary fiction citing Anne Tyler as an influence? Or just try walking into a literary gathering and mentioning that the latest book you've read and really enjoyed is the new novel by Anne Tyler. When I first moved to New York, I was surprised by the reactions I got when I mentioned her work. One writing teacher of mine, a Pulitzer-Prize winner himself, told me that when he'd first heard I was a Tyler fan he'd been seriously worried about my work. Another writer said, "Oh, her? She's so middlebrow."

Indeed, this is the chief charge against Tyler, that she's "middlebrow." (Type "Anne Tyler" plus "middlebrow" into Google and see how many hits you get.) Critics never explain this judgment with any specific objections to Tyler's work. There's simply a roll of the eyes, a wink-wink, and a "you know, middlebrow," dismissal. And then it's on to more serious stuff like a book by one of the Jonathans, or Zadie Smith (?).

So just how good is Anne Tyler? Is she a serious writer deserving of our attention or a hack who's managed to pull the wool over the eyes of a few select critics?

First, let's consider her weaknesses. Tyler's chief fault as a writer is that her characters never seem overly troubled by the drive for sex. (No less a writer than E. M. Forster had the same problem; Katherine Mansfield famously claimed to have come away from Howards End unsure of Helen Schlegel had been impregnated by Leonard Bast or a stolen umbrella.) I've read fifteen of Tyler's seventeen novels at this point, and am hard-pressed to remember a sexual act described in any of them. Often her characters express a desire for companionship, love, or even cuddling. (In her latest novel, a character memorably recalls sleeping curled up next to her husband like "two cashews.") Sex itself, however, is only alluded to (the two central couples of Digging to America have been trying to have kids, but you never get a sense of how they've been trying!), and rarely if ever glimpsed head on, discussed, or even contemplated in Tyler's world. This evasion comes off as all the more peculiar in relation to a literary landscape littered with authors like Michel Houellebecq or Philip Roth who seem unable to go without a few choice bits of porn for a few chapters, let alone an entire novel.

Tyler is also a relentlessly provincial writer. Digging to America like all her books since her fourth novel, The Clock Winder, is set in and around the city of Baltimore. Of course, Faulkner was provincial too, but somehow the provinces in his books, the decaying ante-bellum South, seem more important than the anonymous suburbs of Baltimore, whose sole element of local color seems to be a queer mispronunciation of Baltimore as "Balmer." Larger issues like politics rarely intrude in this gentle sheltered world, except as markers of time passing. It should be noted, however, that in Tyler's last two books, The Amateur Marriage and Digging to America, she has begun grappling with the effects of history (the turbulent social changes of the `60s and current concerns about immigration and the fluidity of identity) on private lives to fruitful effect.

Work is not Tyler's strong point either. Most of her characters are rarely shown in work settings, and seem to forget their jobs entirely once they leave the office, particularly if their professions are the usual ones, i.e. doctor, lawyer, teacher, real estate agent. The great exception to this rule is when her characters have odd self-created start-up businesses that run from home, running a "homesick restaurant," or writing guidebooks for people who hate to travel.

No sex, no politics, little work, nary a curse word, how do Tyler's characters pass the time? Mostly they chat together over meals or politely bicker on the phone, shop, attend parties, change diapers, or vacuum stubborn peanut-butter covered graham cracker crumbs out of rugs. Little is at stake but the human heart and perhaps a relationship or two, though the same might be said of Jane Austen as well, and look what happened to her career.

So what are Tyler's strengths? To begin with, few contemporary writers are able to generate as much liveliness and energy on the page as she does with so quiet a style. Contemporary writers tend to fall into one of two camps. Those like Philip Roth or Gary Shteyngart make you feel the pulse and rhythm of life with long sprawling somersaulting sentences that neatly echo the rhythms of life. Then you have writers more in the vein of Raymond Carver who use a hard-bitten minimalism to express alienation. Tyler walks a middle path, avoiding veering into extreme wildernesses of verbosity or abstemiousness. Yet her style is anything but boring, I think because of her word choices, which are marked by a clear-eyed precision matched with a somewhat whimsical wit. The following line from Digging to America is typically Tyler: "Her eyes were the shape of watermelon seeds, very black and cut very precisely into her small, solemn face." Or the wonderful surprise at the end of this sentence, from the novel Earthly Possessions, "I tripped over a mustard jar big enough to pickle a baby in." Or this crystalline description from The Amateur Marriage: "an upper lip that rose in two little points so sharp they might have been drawn with a pen."

Next, Tyler captures the complexity of family life and the difficult choice between being an individual versus belonging to a group. Her characters may not struggle against the usual bugbears of fiction, (bad sex, money trouble, unfulfilling job) but they are in a life and death struggle against the bonds of familial and societal expectations, sometimes barely detectable in today's less regimented world, but inexorably present all the same. Maryam, the Iranian-born matriarch at the center of Digging to America is a classic Tyler heroine, a capable woman, polite to a fault, yet troubled by her conflicting desires to be independent and to connect to others.

But Tyler's chief strength is how she makes you genuinely feel for characters, tugs at heart-strings more effectively than any writer alive. How does she do this? By focusing in like a laser beam on desire, each character's desire is clearly-marked, however strange, and they're so sure of what they want that we have to read on to see if they get it or not. This is not easy to do, especially when her characters themselves don’t seem to know. Perhaps this is the mysterious alchemy in her work that reviewers are constantly referring to.

So in the end, is Anne Tyler guilty of being middlebrow? Yes, but only in the sense that Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Michael Cunningham, or Tom Perrotta and any number of writers who explore the difficulties of modern suburban life are also middlebrow. It's not a fault, just the description of our times. Most of us in America today lead small, comfortable lives punctuated with trips to shopping malls. Few of us live next door to Beowulf. Why should we expect our novelists to compose epics about the way we live now?

Going Home

After almost a year of living in Rome, my Italian adventure is coming to a close. I've been trying to think about what it's all meant to me, and how the experiences I've had will stay with me in the future. I think the quality that characterizes this year for me best is "double-ness." Not a very elegant way for a writer to put it, but it's the best word I can think of for this year.

First, there's Italy itself, which is such a splendid contradiction. You have a country with such a rich and deep history going from the Etruscans to the Roman empire to the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, a place that for so many years was the center of political power and cultural output that's almost unrivaled in history. And now? Since the unification, Italy has been ruled by a series of fragile, squabbling coalitions interrupted by periods of relative stability under the rule of a fascist (Mussolini) and a proto-fascist (Berlusconi). In terms of culture, Italy has gone from the dizzying heights of Virgil, Dante, Michelangelo, and Leonardo (to name a very very few stars in a vast solar system) to not a hell of a lot. There was opera, and directors like Fellini, De Sica, Visconti, and Pasolini. A few talented writers like Elias Canetti, Italo Calvino, and Primo Levi. And an art movement, Arte Povera, that was characterized by its ephermerality.

And then there's the Italian lifestyle, which can seem so laidback and easygoing. Italians can be so warm and informal. "Don't stand on ceremony," they seem to be saying. "Just come to my house for dinner and relax." Do whatever you like. Except don't use a knife to cut your pasta or put cheese on a dish with seafood or drink white wine with meat or red wine with fish or leave a party or a dinner too early (meaning less than four hours).

Which brings us to the question of rules in Italy. Sometimes they don't matter at all and sometimes they are dreadfully important. Witness the following two examples.

Example A: When I first came to Italy, I was on a bus when that rarest of rare events happened: an inspector boarded and asked to see if I'd bought a ticket. Misunderstanding what she meant, I replied in Italian, "I'm getting off in ten stops." The inspector heaved a great sigh and repeated her question in English, then said, "Okay, okay" and moved on to the next passenger. I tried to show her my valid ticket, but she couldn't have cared less.

Example B: A month ago, I went to buy a ticket to a movie that started at 8:00. I arrived at 8:04. The woman at the box office informed me I couldn't go in because it was after 8:00 and her computer now only printed tickets for the next show at 10:30. "But can't I buy a 10:30 ticket and go in now?" I asked. "No." "Why not?" "Because." "But why? It's the same price, and I've only missed a few minutes." "Because you can't. Next customer." "Are we in Germany?" I said. "I guess so," she said. A friend of mine who was there at the time said, "This theater is full of assholes," and we left the building. As we were standing outside, the woman got up out of her chair, came out of the booth, followed us outside, and said to me, "Excuse me, excuse me. You, here, are the asshole," and then returned to her desk.

Another time I was in a bakery and could smell the delicious perfume of some fresh rolls coming out of the oven. I asked if I could have one, and was told, "These rolls won't be ready for another half-hour." A minute or so later, another person behind the counter said, "Didn't you want one of these fresh rolls? How many do you want. I'll wrap them up for you now."

This kind of thing happens all the time. Depending on who you talk to and what mood she's in, you'll hear either, "Don't worry about it. Do whatever you want." Or "But you can't do that! It's against The Rules!"

But for me personally, the biggest source of double-ness of this past year has been living here while my partner of over five years remained back in New York. We visited each other every two months or so, taking turns crossing the Atlantic, but life without him hasn't been the same. With every new beautiful thing I see or place I visit or person I meet, the pleasure is that much less sweet because he can't be here to share the experience with me.

Going home, however, doesn't meant the end of double-ness. Though it may stand out in higher relief here in Italy, we in America have plenty of experience with it as well. (For example, fundamentalist Christians who believe abortion is murder while they whole-heartedly back the death penalty.) And maybe that's the lesson I've taken from my year, to take a second look at the mass of self-contradictions we live by, the unswervingly single-minded allegiance we pay to truths (political, religious, sexual, cultural) that seem self-evident, but upon closer examination just don't make sense.