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?