The Immersion Library

She would have made a better mother, perhaps, if she hadn’t remembered so well how it felt to be a child.

How ordinary…I am. This story of Ira and Maggie, Jesse and Fiona, Serena and Mr. Otis…my story.

Anne Tyler’s writing style holds one’s attention with its simplicity and pacing. Yet more than this, I commend her style because it somehow sustains an energy through the mundane dialogue and tedious events. I would not characterize her style as poetic or crafty, yet I would absolutely call it artistic in its ability to match her characterizations. Her third-person narrative allows for the characters to speak for themselves without explaining their feelings and minds on its own too deeply. And yet, simultaneously, it can distinctively shift its bias from one character to the next. I enjoy contemplating the idea of multiple third-person narrators in this book.

If the best in literary art holds a mirror up to society, Anne Tyler shrinks this idiom to a more microchosmic level of family. I find pieces of my mother in Maggie; the pieces of yearning, for hope, for making the best of a broken dream, for ignoring the wreckage in the wake of chasing her goal. Pieces of so many siblings in Jesse and Daisy; of Fiona in so many children who desparately want to trust in love but must first find unassailable proof. So many pieces of me.

Tyler does not expose life’s hidden truths in this book. But with seemingly casual effort, she extracts the reader’s life experience and impresses it on the page; like a fortune-teller who can speak just specifically enough for someone to feel unquestioningly that she refers to their future. She holds back just enough to let the reader compose the characterizations, imagine the homes, the car, and the relationships. She somehow lets the reader do her work for her, and they do so gladly.