Although Anne Tyler’s books have always been popular with general readers, acclaim from critics came more slowly. With Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, however, Tyler’s position in American literature was firmly established. In addition to her many short stories and novels, Tyler is much in demand as a book reviewer. She has achieved her greatest success and recognition as a witty yet serious and compassionate observer of human nature, with a polished style, a strong sense of irony, and an uncanny ability to create memorable characters and to reproduce their speech as if she had actually heard it.
Anne Tyler
Tyler is the only daughter of Lloyd Parry and Phyllis (Mahon) Tyler; there were also four boys in the family, a circumstance that appears in reverse in Tyler’s first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, in which the main character is an only son with six sisters. Tyler denies that her novels are autobiographical. Although she was reared in North Carolina, she does not consider herself a southern writer, despite the repeated statement to that effect on the jackets of most of her books. Nor does she consider herself a feminist writer; she is more interested in people than in movements.
Tyler graduated from Duke University in 1961, having begun college at the age of sixteen. A course on the short story taught by the writer Reynolds Price had a great impact on her, though not on her style. After doing graduate study in Russian at Columbia University, she married Taghi Modarressi, a psychiatrist, in 1963, and the couple had two daughters, Tezh and Mitra.
A longtime resident of Baltimore, Maryland, Tyler has set most of her novels in various parts of that city. She has used other locations only briefly and secondarily, including small towns in North Carolina and Pennsylvania and such cities as New York, New Orleans, and Paris. She once said that what she was doing in her novels was populating a town–not with people she knew, but with people about whom she had written. Such comments are rare, however, as Tyler shuns publicity, does not give readings, and almost never grants interviews.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986, The Accidental Tourist was filmed in 1987; the film also won awards, though the reviews were mixed. Critics responded to Tyler’s next book, Breathing Lessons, in much the same way; while the book remained on best-seller lists for several months, won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1989, and was filmed in 1994, some critics found it sentimental, slapstick, and banal, while others were unreserved in their enthusiastic praise.
All Tyler’s novels draw on a family or a familylike community as a context in which to observe how the characters play out their lives and their relations with one another. The author’s viewpoint varies over a wide range of possibilities: a young boy in If Morning Ever Comes; a teenage girl in A Slipping-Down Life; a wife in Earthly Possessions; an elderly, dying mother in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, in which parts of the story are also told by each of the woman’s three children; and a young uncle, turned single parent, who shares the narrative with two nieces and a nephew in Saint Maybe. In The Ladder of Years a woman runs away from her family while on a beach vacation and reinvents herself in the image she feels more truly represents herself, while the protagonist of Back When We Were Grownups starts the novel with the realization that she had grown up to become “the wrong person” and attempts to discover whether it is still possible to become the right one. These examples show how Tyler varies her narrative voice, which is always sure and credible.
Tyler’s characters are often eccentric and quirky, but they are just as often, in the same book, pitiable in their idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings, and failures. Tyler’s world is a comic one where ordinary people make mistakes yet learn to cope with life’s problems, take personal risks, and find alternative ways to survive. Contemporary society constantly challenges Tyler’s characters with its changing traditions and sex-roles, its urban decline, and its clutter. Her protagonists find they cannot cling to the past but must move forward, make adult choices, learn to satisfy their own needs while reaching out to others, deal with modern complexity, and tolerate human difference. The more inclusive and complicated their worlds become, Tyler suggests, the more vital and fulfilled they will be.