Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage is not so much a novel as a really long argument. Michael is a good boy from a Polish neighborhood in Baltimore; Pauline is a harum-scarum, bright-cheeked girl who blows into Michael's family's grocery store at the outset of World War II. She appears with a bloodied brow, supported by a gaggle of girlfriends. Michael patches her up, and neither of them are ever the same. Well, not the same as they were before, but pretty much the same as everyone else. After the war, they live over the shop with Michael's mother till they've saved enough to move to the suburbs. There they remain with their three children, until the onset of the sixties, when their eldest daughter runs away to San Francisco. Their marriage survives for a while, finally crumbling in the seventies. If this all sounds a tad generic, Tyler's case isn't helped by the characteristics she's given the two spouses. Him: repressed, censorious, quiet. Her: voluble, emotional, romantic. Mars, meet Venus. What marks this couple, though, and what makes them come alive, is their bitter, unproductive, tooth-and-nail fighting. Tyler is exploring the way that ordinary-seeming, prosperous people can survive in emotional poverty for years on end. She gets just right the tricks Michael and Pauline play on themselves in order to stay together: "How many times," Pauline asks herself, "when she was weary of dealing with Michael, had she forced herself to recall the way he'd looked that first day? The slant of his fine cheekbones, the firming of his lips as he pressed the adhesive tape in place on her forehead." Only in antogonism do Michael and Pauline find a way to express themselves. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly
Because Tyler writes with scrupulous accuracy about muddled, unglamorous suburbanites, it is easy to underestimate her as a sort of Pyrex realist. Yes, Tyler intuitively understands the middle class's Norman Rockwell ideal, but she doesn't share it; rather, she has a masterful ability to make it bleed. Her latest novel delineates, in careful strokes, the 30-year marriage of Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay, and its dissolution. In December 1941 in St. Cassians, a mainly Eastern European conclave in Baltimore, 20-year-old Michael meets Pauline and is immediately smitten. They marry after Michael is discharged from the army, but their temperaments don't mix. For Michael, self-control is the greatest of virtues; for Pauline, expression is what makes us human. She is compulsively friendly, a bad hider of emotions, selfish in her generosity ("my homeless man") and generous in her selfishness. At Pauline's urging, the two move to the suburbs, where they raise three children, George, Karen and Lindy. Lindy runs away in 1960 and never comes back-although in 1968, Pauline and Michael retrieve Pagan, Lindy's three-year-old, from her San Francisco landlady while Lindy detoxes in a rehab community that her parents aren't allowed to enter. Michael and Pauline got married at a time when the common wisdom, expressed by Pauline's mother, was that "marriages were like fruit trees.... Those trees with different kinds of branches grafted onto the trunks. After a time, they meld, they grow together, and... if you tried to separate them you would cause a fatal wound." They live into an era in which the accumulated incompatibilities of marriage end, logically, in divorce. For Michael, who leaves Pauline on their 30th anniversary, divorce is redemption. For Pauline, the divorce is, at first, a tragedy; gradually, separation becomes a habit. A lesser novelist would take moral sides, using this story to make a didactic point. Tyler is much more concerned with the fine art of human survival in changing circumstances. The range and power of this novel should not only please Tyler's immense readership but also awaken us to the collective excellency of her career.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Tyler reliably dredges up the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly of domestic life in Baltimore. Though "seldom if ever spiteful," notes The New York Times Book Review, Tyler is a "mischief-maker" in the spirit of Jane Austen. Amateur Marriage, while departing from the trademark quirkiness of previous novels, affirms that reputation. Against the backdrop of six decades of American life--from the bombing of Hiroshima through September 11, from the old neighborhood to the slums, from the tract homes of the '50s and the hippie '60s to the present day--Tyler introduces a typical family. Typical, that is, in a most mundane way: a coterie of husbands and wives, parents and children trying to survive life's twists while preserving an unhappy status quo. Tyler casts an atypically dark look at a hasty wartime marriage and its aftermath. By introducing the Anton family's flaws in a nonjudgmental, sympathetic, and even amused tone, she exposes the aching loneliness of life alone and the crushing weight of life together. It's a heavier novel, lightened by a narrative structure that sidesteps the tedium of multigenerational epics. If we miss some key events between chapters, so what? Critics commend Tyler for giving equal voice to Pauline and Michael, but disagree about their relative value. Some saw Pauline as the novel's emotional core and Michael as Tyler's stock, stoic male. Others thought the opposite. Some even viewed the Antons as so ordinary as to be a bit dull. Yet most considered their runaway daughter Lindy, "zapped and fried and hopped and wigged out," as the weak link. As a casualty of the marriage and the era, Lindy might have spoken up--but her reappearance 29 years after her disappearance emphasizes her absence. Amateur Marriage has some flaws. Yet, with her usual penetrating insight, Tyler captures life at its most ordinary, then carves it open to dissect the bonds that linger on.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From AudioFile
Tyler's ambitious sixteenth novel explores a weighty topic, the erosion of a marriage, over an unusually long period of time, 1941 to the present. Once again, you'll enjoy Tyler's trademark light yet insightful touch. The ill-fated couple at the story's center, Michael and Pauline, are as familiar as relatives-just "two good people who are bad for each other," as Tyler puts it. The point of view in the book's 10 chapters shifts from one family member to another, allowing sympathy for all. Blair Brown's capable reading beautifully facilitates this movement between characters. Brown's voice, like Tyler's writing, is familiar and wise; her subtle distinctions in tone draw contrasts between impetuous Pauline and stolid, methodical Michael without ever hitting a distracting note. J.C.G. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
The attack on Pearl Harbor serves as the catalyst for Tyler's sixteenth novel by propelling Pauline, bleeding from a minor wound sustained in the fervor of a spontaneous patriotic parade, into the humble family grocery run by handsome and reserved young Michael and his embittered widow mother. An outsider to this tightly knit, Polish Catholic Baltimore neighborhood, Pauline is pretty, impulsive, and touchy, and although she and the far more deliberate and reticent Michael fall instantly in love, they are also immediately at odds. They marry precipitously, move into the cramped apartment above the store with his mother, rapidly produce three children, and consistently make each other miserable. Tyler's strength resides in her penetrating psychological portraits and delight in mundane details, and these gifts are evident in the novel's promising opening scenes. But the usually adept Tyler ends up setting 30 years of tedious marital unhappiness and domestic tragedy against a distressingly superficial and bland accounting of the rise of suburbia and the flowering of hippie culture. Her observations about how abruptly even the most boring life can go wrong, and about the fact that we are all amateurs in our first marriages, are poignant, however, and may be enough to satisfy readers who seek safe and comfy novels. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“An ode to the complexities of familial love, the centripetal and centrifugal forces that keep families together and send their members flying apart, the supremely ordinary pleasures and frustrations of middle-class American life.”
--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Tyler ranges over 60 years of American experience… from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the anniversary of that day in 2001…as she tracks one couple’s domestic disturbances…[Her] writing is beautifully accurate, more often than not with a glinting vein of humor.”
–William H. Pritchard, New York Times Book Review, front cover

“She evokes the entire sweep of [a marriage] with uncommon delicacy & dignity… gives us the feeling of being inside Michael and Pauline Anton’s marriage.”
–John Freeman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“She traces the stormy union of two people who love but can’t stand each other.”
–Kirkus Reviews

“This ‘wickedly good’ author has come to represent the best of today’s American literature… She is an exquisite chronicler of the everyday
…Her characters are at once infuriating and endearing, conservative yet quietly eccentric.”
–Lisa Allardice, The Observer, London

“Her command of what will move a story forward & engross a reader is faultless.”
–Martha Southgate, Baltimore Sun

“She expertly explores the perils of marriage… Wise & observant…She has the uncanny ability to expose the most confusing contradictions of love.” –Connie Ogle, Miami Herald

“In the fervor of WWII, Michael and Pauline rush head-long into marriage, then live in a constant state of turmoil …We watch safely from a distance like a busybody neighbor hiding behind the curtains, judgmental yet fascinated.”
–Kim Askew, Elle magazine


From the Hardcover edition.

Review
?An ode to the complexities of familial love, the centripetal and centrifugal forces that keep families together and send their members flying apart, the supremely ordinary pleasures and frustrations of middle-class American life.?
--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Tyler ranges over 60 years of American experience? from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the anniversary of that day in 2001?as she tracks one couple?s domestic disturbances?[Her] writing is beautifully accurate, more often than not with a glinting vein of humor.?
?William H. Pritchard, New York Times Book Review, front cover

?She evokes the entire sweep of [a marriage] with uncommon delicacy & dignity? gives us the feeling of being inside Michael and Pauline Anton?s marriage.?
?John Freeman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

?She traces the stormy union of two people who love but can?t stand each other.?
?Kirkus Reviews

?This ?wickedly good? author has come to represent the best of today?s American literature? She is an exquisite chronicler of the everyday
?Her characters are at once infuriating and endearing, conservative yet quietly eccentric.?
?Lisa Allardice, The Observer, London

?Her command of what will move a story forward & engross a reader is faultless.?
?Martha Southgate, Baltimore Sun

?She expertly explores the perils of marriage? Wise & observant?She has the uncanny ability to expose the most confusing contradictions of love.? ?Connie Ogle, Miami Herald

?In the fervor of WWII, Michael and Pauline rush head-long into marriage, then live in a constant state of turmoil ?We watch safely from a distance like a busybody neighbor hiding behind the curtains, judgmental yet fascinated.?
?Kim Askew, Elle magazine


From the Hardcover edition.

Book Description
From the inimitable Anne Tyler, a rich and compelling novel about a mismatched marriage—and its consequences, spanning three generations.

They seemed like the perfect couple—young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother’s grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.

Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable.

From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more fully into the complex entanglements of family life in this wise, embracing, and deeply perceptive novel.


From the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap
From the inimitable Anne Tyler, a rich and compelling novel about a mismatched marriage—and its consequences, spanning three generations.

They seemed like the perfect couple—young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother’s grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.

Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable.

From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more fully into the complex entanglements of family life in this wise, embracing, and deeply perceptive novel.


From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941 but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. This is Anne Tyler’s sixteenth novel; her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1.
Common Knowledge

Anyone in the neighborhood could tell you how Michael and Pauline first met.

It happened on a Monday afternoon early in December of 1941. St. Cassian was its usual poky self that day—a street of narrow East Baltimore row houses, carefully kept little homes intermingled with shops no bigger than small parlors. The Golka twins, identically kerchiefed, compared cake rouges through the window of Sweda’s Drugs. Mrs. Pozniak stepped out of the hardware store with a tiny brown paper bag that jingled. Mr. Kostka’s Model-B Ford puttered past, followed by a stranger’s sleekly swishing Chrysler Airstream and then by Ernie Moskowicz on the butcher’s battered delivery bike.

In Anton’s Grocery—a dim, cram-packed cubbyhole with an L-shaped wooden counter and shelves that reached the low ceiling—Michael’s mother wrapped two tins of peas for Mrs. Brunek. She tied them up tightly and handed them over without a smile, without a “Come back soon” or a “Nice to see you.” (Mrs. Anton had had a hard life.) One of Mrs. Brunek’s boys—Carl? Paul? Peter? they all looked so much alike—pressed his nose to the glass of the penny-candy display. A floorboard creaked near the cereals, but that was just the bones of the elderly building settling deeper into the ground.

Michael was shelving Woodbury’s soap bars behind the longer, left-hand section of the counter. He was twenty at the time, a tall young man in ill-fitting clothes, his hair very black and cut too short, his face a shade too thin, with that dark kind of whiskers that always showed no matter how often he shaved. He was stacking the soap in a pyramid, a base of five topped by four, topped by three . . . although his mother had announced, more than once, that she preferred a more compact, less creative arrangement.

Then, tinkle, tinkle! and wham! and what seemed at first glance a torrent of young women exploded through the door. They brought a gust of cold air with them and the smell of auto exhaust. “Help us!” Wanda Bryk shrilled. Her best friend, Katie Vilna, had her arm around an unfamiliar girl in a red coat, and another girl pressed a handkerchief to the red-coated girl’s right temple. “She’s been hurt! She needs first aid!” Wanda cried.

Michael stopped his shelving. Mrs. Brunek clapped a hand to her cheek, and Carl or Paul or Peter drew in a whistle of a breath. But Mrs. Anton did not so much as blink. “Why bring her here?” she asked. “Take her to the drugstore.”

“The drugstore’s closed,” Katie told her.

“Closed?”

“It says so on the door. Mr. Sweda’s joined the Coast Guard.”

“He’s done what?”

The girl in the red coat was very pretty, despite the trickle of blood running past one ear. She was taller than the two neighborhood girls but slender, more slightly built, with a leafy cap of dark-blond hair and an upper lip that rose in two little points so sharp they might have been drawn with a pen. Michael came out from behind the counter to take a closer look at her. “What happened?” he asked her—only her, gazing at her intently.

“Get her a Band-Aid! Get iodine!” Wanda Bryk commanded. She had gone through grade school with Michael. She seemed to feel she could boss him around.

The girl said, “I jumped off a streetcar.”

Her voice was low and husky, a shock after Wanda’s thin vio- lin notes. Her eyes were the purple-blue color of pansies. Michael swallowed.

“A parade’s begun on Dubrowski Street,” Katie was telling the others. “All six of the Szapp boys are enlisting, haven’t you heard? And a couple of their friends besides. They’ve got this banner—‘Watch out, Japs! Here come the Szapps!’—and everyone’s seeing them off. They’ve gathered such a crowd that the traffic can’t hardly get through. So Pauline here—she was heading home from work; places are closing early—what does she do? Jumps off a speeding streetcar to join in.”

The streetcar couldn’t have been speeding all that fast, if traffic was clogged, but nobody pointed that out. Mrs. Brunek gave a sympathetic murmur. Carl or Paul or Peter said, “Can I go, Mama? Can I? Can I go watch the parade?”

“I just thought we should try and support our boys,” Pauline told Michael.

He swallowed again. He said, “Well, of course.”

“You’re not going to help our boys any knocking yourself silly,” the girl with the handkerchief said. From her tolerant tone, you could see that she and Pauline were friends, although she was less attractive—a brown-haired girl with a calm expression and eyebrows so long and level that she seemed lacking in emotion.

“We think she hit her head against a lamppost,” Wanda said, “but nobody could be sure in all the fuss. She landed in our laps, just about, with Anna here a ways behind her. I said, ‘Jeepers! Are you okay?’ Well, somebody had to do something; we couldn’t just let her bleed to death. Don’t you people have Band-Aids?”

“This place is not a pharmacy,” Mrs. Anton said. And then, pursuing an obvious connection,

“Whatever got into Nick Sweda? He must be thirty-five if he’s a day!” Michael, meanwhile, had turned away from Pauline to join his mother behind the counter—the shorter, end section of the counter where the cash register stood. He bent down, briefly disappeared, and emerged with a cigar box. “Bandages,” he explained.

Not Band-Aids, but old-fashioned cotton batting rolled in dark-blue tissue the exact shade of Pauline’s eyes, and a spool of white adhesive tape, and an oxblood-colored bottle of iodine. Wanda stepped forward to take them; but no, Michael unrolled the cotton himself and tore a wad from one corner. He soaked the wad with iodine and came back to stand in front of Pauline. “Let me see,” he said.

There was a reverent, alert silence, as if everyone understood that this moment was significant—even the girl with the handkerchief, the one Wanda had called Anna, although Anna could not have known that Michael Anton was ordinarily the most reserved boy in the parish. She removed the handkerchief from Pauline’s temple. Michael pried away a petal of Pauline’s hair and started dabbing with the cotton wad. Pauline held very still.

The wound, it seemed, was a two-inch red line, long but not deep, already closing. “Ah,” Mrs. Brunek said. “No need for stitches.”

“We can’t be sure of that!” Wanda cried, unwilling to let go of the drama.

But Michael said, “She’ll be fine,” and he tore off a new wad of cotton. He plastered it to Pauline’s temple with a crisscross of adhesive tape.

Now she looked like a fight victim in a comic strip. As if she knew that, she laughed. It turned out she had a dimple in each cheek. “Thanks very much,” she told him. “Come and watch the parade with us.”

He said, “All right.”

Just that easily.

“Can I come too?” the Brunek boy asked. “Can I, Mama? Please?”

Mrs. Brunek said, “Ssh.”

“But who will help with the store?” Mrs. Anton asked Michael.

As if he hadn’t heard her, he turned to take his jacket from the coat tree in the corner. It was a schoolboy kind of jacket—a big, rough plaid in shades of gray and charcoal. He shrugged himself into it, leaving it unbuttoned. “Ready?” he asked the girls.

The others watched after him—his mother and Mrs. Brunek, and Carl or Paul or Peter, and little old Miss Pelowski, who chanced to be approaching just as Michael and the four girls came barreling out the door. “What . . . ?” Miss Pelowski asked. “What on earth . . . ? Where . . . ?”

Michael didn’t even slow down. He was halfway up the block now, with three girls trailing him and a fourth one at his side. She clung to the crook of his left arm and skimmed along next to him in her brilliant red coat.

Even then, Miss Pelowski said later, she had known that he was a goner.

“Parade” was too formal a word, really, for the commotion on Dubrowski Street. It was true that several dozen young men were walking down the center of the pavement, but they were still in civilian clothes and they made no attempt to keep in step. The older of John Piazy’s sons wore John’s sailor cap from the Great War. Another boy, name unknown, had flung a regulation Army blanket around his shoulders like a cape. It was a shabby, straggly, unkempt little regiment, their faces chapped, their noses running in the cold.

Even so, people were enthusiastic. They waved homemade signs and American flags and the front page of the Baltimore Sun. They cheered at speeches—any speeches, any rousing phrases shouted over their heads. “You’ll be home by New Year’s, boys!” a man in earmuffs called, and “New Year’s Day! Hurray!” zigzagged through the crowd.

When Michael Anton showed up with four girls, everybody assumed he was enlisting too. “Go get ’em, Michael!” someone shouted. Though John Piazy’s wife said, “Ah, no. It would be the death of his mother, poor soul, with all she’s had to suffer.”

One of the four girls, the one in red, asked, “Will you be going, Michael?” An outsider, she was, but very easy on the eyes. The red of her coat brought out the natural glow of her skin, and a bandage on her temple made her look madcap and rakish. No wonder Michael gave her a long, considering stare before he spoke.

“Well,” he said finally, and then he kind of hitched up his shoulders. “Well, naturally I will be!” he said.

A ragged cheer rang out from everyone standing nearby, and another of the girls—Wanda Bryk, in fact—pushed him forward until he had merged with the young men in the street. Leo Kazmerow walked on his left; the four girls scurried along the sidewalk on his right. “We love you, Michael!” Wanda cried, and Katie Vilna called, “Come back soon!” as if he were embarking for the trenches that very instant.

Then Michael was forgotten. He was swept away, and other young men replaced him: Davey Witt, Joe Dobek, Joey Serge. “You go show those Japs what we’re made of!” Davey’s father was shouting. For after all, a man was saying, who could tell when they’d have another chance to get even over Poland? An old woman was crying. John Piazy was telling everybody that neither one of his sons knew the meaning of the word “fear.” And several people were starting in on the where-were-you-when-you-heard discussion. One had not heard till that morning; he’d been burying his mother. One had heard first thing, the first announcement on the radio, but had dismissed it as another Orson Welles hoax. And one, a woman, had been soaking in the bathtub when her husband knocked on the door. “You’re never going to believe this,” he’d called. “I just sat there,” she said. “I just sat and sat. I sat until the water got cold.”

Wanda Bryk returned with Katie Vilna and the brown-haired girl, but not the girl in red. The girl in red had vanished. It seemed she’d marched off to war with Michael Anton, somebody said.

They did all notice—those in the crowd who knew Michael. It was enough of a surprise so they noticed, and remarked to each other, and remembered for some time afterward.

Word got out, the next day, that Leo Kazmerow had been rejected because he was color-blind. Color-blind! people said. What did color have to do with fighting for your country? Unless maybe he couldn’t recognize the color of someone’s uniform. If he was aiming his gun in battle, say. But everyone agreed that there were ways to get around that. Put him on a ship! Sit him behind a cannon and show him where to shoot!

This conversation took place in Anton’s Grocery. Mrs. Anton was answering the phone, but as soon as she hung up, someone asked, “And what’s the news of Michael, Mrs. Anton?”

“News?” she said.


From the Hardcover edition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"They seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother's grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married." Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable.

FROM THE CRITICS

USA Today

In new novel The Amateur Marriage, Anne Tyler once again displays the qualities of wisdom, insightful writing and compassion that have made the Baltimore resident the most-admired serious yet popular writer working today. One is never embarrassed to be seen reading a Tyler novel. — Deirdre Donahue

The New York Times

Although acquaintances like to think of them as a perfect couple, Pauline and Michael are constantly bickering, sulking and fighting at home. And by cutting back and forth among the viewpoints of different characters, Ms. Tyler is able to provide a kaleidoscopic view of their marriage, and the ripple effect that their contentious relationship has on their children … an ode to the complexities of familial love, the centripetal and centrifugal forces that keep families together and send their members flying apart, the supremely ordinary pleasures and frustrations of middle-class American life. — Michiko Kakutani

The New Yorker

This novel of marital unhappiness focuses on a couple whose fraught relationship spans sixty years. In the early days of the Second World War, Michael and Pauline find themselves drawn together despite misgivings and bitter fights. The resulting marriage is a thirty-year clash between her impulsiveness and self-absorption and his taciturnity and barely suppressed rage. Tyler examines their acrimonious bond, which persists even after their eventual divorce, with a keen eye for the minor differences that suddenly widen into chasms. In order to illuminate every facet of the couple’s interactions and personalities, the story is told from several points of view: those of Michael and Pauline and two of their three children. Although Tyler’s prose occasionally slips into banality, she never falters in creating vivid characters whose weaknesses are both credible and compelling.

Publishers Weekly

Because Tyler writes with scrupulous accuracy about muddled, unglamorous suburbanites, it is easy to underestimate her as a sort of Pyrex realist. Yes, Tyler intuitively understands the middle class's Norman Rockwell ideal, but she doesn't share it; rather, she has a masterful ability to make it bleed. Her latest novel delineates, in careful strokes, the 30-year marriage of Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay, and its dissolution. In December 1941 in St. Cassians, a mainly Eastern European conclave in Baltimore, 20-year-old Michael meets Pauline and is immediately smitten. They marry after Michael is discharged from the army, but their temperaments don't mix. For Michael, self-control is the greatest of virtues; for Pauline, expression is what makes us human. She is compulsively friendly, a bad hider of emotions, selfish in her generosity ("my homeless man") and generous in her selfishness. At Pauline's urging, the two move to the suburbs, where they raise three children, George, Karen and Lindy. Lindy runs away in 1960 and never comes back-although in 1968, Pauline and Michael retrieve Pagan, Lindy's three-year-old, from her San Francisco landlady while Lindy detoxes in a rehab community that her parents aren't allowed to enter. Michael and Pauline got married at a time when the common wisdom, expressed by Pauline's mother, was that "marriages were like fruit trees.... Those trees with different kinds of branches grafted onto the trunks. After a time, they meld, they grow together, and... if you tried to separate them you would cause a fatal wound." They live into an era in which the accumulated incompatibilities of marriage end, logically, in divorce. For Michael, who leaves Pauline on their 30th anniversary, divorce is redemption. For Pauline, the divorce is, at first, a tragedy; gradually, separation becomes a habit. A lesser novelist would take moral sides, using this story to make a didactic point. Tyler is much more concerned with the fine art of human survival in changing circumstances. The range and power of this novel should not only please Tyler's immense readership but also awaken us to the collective excellency of her career. (Jan.) Forecast: Expect the usual blockbuster sales-there will be a first printing of 300,000. This is also likely to become one of Tyler's strongest backlist titles. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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