Back to Anne Tyler again! I did mean to stop but I saw two of her novels in a charity shop for 50 pence each and so obviously I had to buy them and obviously had to read them. Just finished this one. It is, I think, rather more sombre than the others I have read so far -- not that she does not deal always with serious subjects, but I suppose I felt there was less comedy interwoven here. However this is not to say that I did not enjoy it -- far from it. This is a really impressive novel. If I tell you what it is about, you will think it sounds like nothing much -- is is, as the title suggests, the story of a marriage. Beginning in 1941, when young Michael Anton, working in his mother's grocery store, is swept off his feet by pretty, impulsive Pauline, it simply charts their lives from that point on, through marriage, the birth of their three children, the disappearance of their eldest daughter, their rescue of their grandson, their divorce, and so on until the very end of both their lives. But my goodness this is well done. These two people are so incompatible -- Michael serious, calm, unemotional, Pauline swinging between quirky humour and furious rages -- but something holds them together. It would be easy to say it is just sex, but in fact as I think becomes clear there is something deeper there too. Yes, Michael is probably more contented with his second wife, but as he approaches the end of his life, he comes to realise what he has lost in losing Pauline. Painful, in a way, but so true and so perceptive, and the end, though I was a little tearful, is also kind of uplifting.
The structure of the novel is also very interesting -- there is not really a continuous narrative. Instead, each chapter deals with an episode, and generally there is as much as ten years in between each. So though you are filled in to an extent about what has happened in the interim, much is left to you to surmise. And though the narrative is in the third person, each chapter is told from a different person's point of view. This is so effective! I found it particularly so when one chapter, about Michael's new relationship, left me feeling so sad and anxious for Pauline, only to find that the next chapter showed how, despite her underlying sadness, she is coping so well and having, really, a tolerable and sometimes even enjoyable life -- a real survivor, even though she panics so badly when her pilot light goes out and has to send for her son to light it for her. All the characters are so believable, and the period detail is wonderful -- the nearest really that the novel comes to comedy is in the dreadful episode when Michael and Pauline go to Haight Ashbury in the 1960s to look for their errant daughter. All terrific stuff.
Sorry -- no picture today!
