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Wrestling with change: Discourse strategies in Anne Tyler
Frontiers, 1998 by Carroll, Virginia Schaefer
It is not surprising that Anne Tyler, described as one of America's "best-loved practitioners of the literature of daily life,"' would turn her middle-aged eye toward the particular details of women's aging, the ways in which physiological rhythms intersect with other rhythms of life, the negotiations with self and others as a woman in midlife necessarily redefines identity and position. What is surprising, however, is that critics and reviewers fail to examine her recent novels in such a light-continuing to praise her work for its narrative virtuosity,2 its celebration of the ordinary,3 its portrayal of the resilience of the human spirit, but not acknowledging that two recent novels may be read as boldly feminist accounts of the climacteric. Breathing Lessons, the 1988 novel that earned Tyler the Pulitzer Prize, was described on the book jacket as showing "all there is to know about a marriage," and many critics viewed this work as a comic, insightful, sometimes annoying romp into the lives of a couple who have been married for twenty-eight years. Tyler's most recent novel, Ladder of Years (1995), earned similar praise as a work that ultimately "affirms the richness and durability of family bonds."4 Critical reviewers of both books suggest that nothing seems to happen in these circular plots; some note with disappointment that the novels lack the endearing quirkiness of the characters in some of Tyler's earlier novels, such as The Accidental Tourist, Celestial Navigation, or Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
If one considers, however, that Tyler was forty-six years old when Breathing Lessons was published and fifty-three when Ladder of Years was released, these novels can be seen as offering an intimate account of the private and public discourse strategies of middle-aged, middle-class women engaged in what Germaine Greer calls the "difficult transition from reproductive animal to reflective animal."5 Their situations and resolutions differ from Tyler's previous middle-aged women featured in what Margaret Morganroth Gullette identifies as midlife progress narratives.' Embedded in these richly detailed and often comic novels is a deft examination of how women use layers of conversations with themselves, their pasts, and other women to define their experience of the climacteric. Greer's assertion that "the menopausal woman is the prisoner of a stereotype and will not be rescued from it until she has begun to tell her own story" suggests that Tyler's work may well be intensely personal, even if it is not autobiographical.7 Thus within the characters whose midlife struggles she creates, Tyler may well be telling her own story, confidently assuming that the pervasive questions that haunt her heroines challenge the hot-flash, hot-temper stereotypes of women around age fifty. Individually, Breathing Lessons and Ladder of Years boldly position women's wrestling with change at the center of each work, asserting that such a subject is worthy of notice and contemplation; taken collectively, however, these works demonstrate Tyler's own discourse on the climacteric, the ways in which an astute, creative, and healthy woman might change her perspective over seven critical years in her midlife and use her art to express, with delicacy and dignity, the life-changing experience about which we are trained to be silent.
On the surface, these novels may not seem very different in form and content from Tyler's other eleven novels. Breathing Lessons focuses on a single day in the lives of Maggie and Ira Moran, a Baltimore couple who travel to the funeral of an old friend and visit their former daughter-in-law and seven-year-old granddaughter. Amid the comic misadventures and detours, Maggie-who is fortyeight-spends considerable time wondering about herself and her family, the twists and coincidences that set her on this particular road, the uncertainties of the future. Ladder of Years spans over a year in the life of forty-year-old Delia Grinstead, a resident of Baltimore's Roland Park, who walks away from her family on a beach vacation and lives a pared-down, independent life in another city. From her desk in a law office and from her empty rented room overlooking Main Street, Delia observes and later participates in the lives of a parade of interesting characters until the day she returns to Baltimore, presumably to stay. Delia's journey, like Maggie's, is fraught with revisited memories, surprising conversations, and discovery. Like all of Tyler's other novels, these works illustrate the complex paradox of being both an individual and a member of a family, and they examine-in ways often comic and sometimes touching-the startling randomness of even important personal choices. What distinguishes them from other Tyler novels, however, even those that include middle-aged women, is their attention to the ways that Maggie and Delia (neither of whom has gone through menopause yet) are very much in the midst of the climacteric, a sequence of emotional and physiological transitions experienced by women from age thirty-five to sixty.8
