The Amateur Marriage

By Anne Tyler (Knopf, 304 pp., $24.95)

As in virtually all novels by Anne Tyler, the protagonists of The Amateur Marriage are shortsighted, confused, unforgiving, parochial-minded, incurious about history and oblivious to changing social trends. What makes it possible to read about such people without squirming for 300-plus pages is the generosity and glint-eyed amusement with which the author views her created progeny, the palpable pleasure she takes in their flawed presence. It’s an authorial benignity that can only be called divine: With any luck, God, too, views his creations with such loving amusement, such simultaneous affection and sad, head-shaking detachment.

No writer in America understands human nature, or the great, giddy parade of individual human beings, as thoroughly as Anne Tyler does. The ability to view personal flaws with both heartless clarity and ineffable tenderness—and even, thankfully, laugh-out-loud humor—has never stood Tyler in better stead than with Michael and Pauline Anton, the hopeless couple at the heart of The Amateur Marriage. Wed in haste at the outbreak of World War II, they are tragically mismatched. Pauline, Tyler says, “chafed daily at [Michael’s] failings: his rigidity, his caution, his literal-mindedness, his ponderous style of speech, his reluctance to spend money, his suspicion of anything unfamiliar, his tendency to pass judgment, his limited understanding of his own children, his uncharitable attitude toward people down on their luck....” The list goes on and on. And Michael has his own, entirely justifiable catalog of complaints about whimsical, passionate, over-the-top Pauline: “Such a frantic, impossible woman, so unstable, even in good moods, with her exultant voice and glittery eyes, her dangerous excitement. Why, why, why was she the one he had chosen to marry?”

Checks and balances may be a useful way to set up government, but it can be dreadful footing for a marriage, as the Antons prove. But as our neighbors, our colleagues, the parents of our children’s friends—and maybe we ourselves—also prove, it’s the way many, perhaps all marriages are made. The stolid seek spark and lightness in a mate; the flibbertigibbets look for grounding. When the unluckiest of them marry, the years unfold in squabbling: about money, children, sex, about whether to stay in or go out, plant a garden or travel, try an exciting new restaurant or stick with an old favorite. As Pauline wonders during lunch with her girlfriends: “Did all wives believe they had chosen the wrong course?”

Checks and balances may be a useful way to set up government, but it can be dreadful footing for a marriage, as the Antons prove. But as our neighbors, our colleagues, the parents of our children’s friends—and maybe we ourselves—also prove, it’s the way many, perhaps all marriages are made. The stolid seek spark and lightness in a mate; the flibbertigibbets look for grounding. When the unluckiest of them marry, the years unfold in squabbling: about money, children, sex, about whether to stay in or go out, plant a garden or travel, try an exciting new restaurant or stick with an old favorite. As Pauline wonders during lunch with her girlfriends: “Did all wives believe they had chosen the wrong course?”

Tyler alternates her point of view evenly between Michael and Pauline, a narrative strategy that makes each of them seem altogether right and altogether wrong simultaneously. But at odd moments in the story, even the perennially feuding Antons are able to see in each other a glimmer of goodness. When he catches Pauline yet again attempting to put a positive spin on what strikes him as a deeply painful and embarrassing situation, Michael suddenly sees in his wife a crucial potency that he himself lacks: “Another time Michael might have felt annoyed by this rouged and lipsticked version of the truth. Such concern for the looks of things, even within the family! But today, he was touched. It occurred to him that his wife had amazing reserves of strength, that women like Pauline were the ones who kept the planet spinning. Or at least, they made it appear to keep spinning, however it might in fact be wobbling on its axis.”

Despite this ability to show in every character a range of contrarian qualities, Tyler rejects pat conclusions. There’s no glossing over human difference with a shrugged, “To each his own.” Even if no one is to blame, a bad marriage, like any other poor choice, can yield catastrophe. The children of these marriages suffer appallingly, and the Antons have three disconsolate kids. The oldest calls her family a “wretched, tangled knot, inward-turned, stunted, like a trapped fox chewing its own leg off.”

Not all incongruous husbands and wives spend 30 years, as the Antons do, in unyielding anguish. Many discover how to be happy despite their differences: “[Michael] believed that all of them, all those young-marrieds of the war years, had started out in equal ignorance. He pictured them marching down the city street, as people had on the day he enlisted. Then two by two they fell away, having grown wise and seasoned and comfortable in their roles, until only he and Pauline remained, as inexperienced as ever—the last couple left in the amateur’s parade.” Why have he and Pauline not made it? Michael truly has no idea, and Tyler is mum on the subject. Much of human nature is inexplicable, even to the seers.

It would be going too far to make the Antons’ aggrieved and bewildered relationship a symbol of the troubled course of American history. But could there be a better objective correlative of postwar cultural turmoil than an embattled marriage? In many ways, this book is Tyler’s most ambitious, spanning 60 years and touching on social movements (Vietnam, feminism, terrorism, etc.) in a way that earlier books didn’t. Its take on history is nonetheless vintage Tyler: personal, immediate, affecting. During World War II, for example, when a neighbor learns that her son’s body has finally been recovered weeks after his death, she “felt a bolt of something that would almost have to be called anger. They made it sound as if he’d just been thoughtlessly mislaid, she said. Like somebody’s cast-off toy. When she herself had been so careful, all these years, to keep him safe and healthy.”

Unfortunately, this microcosmic mirror of social cataclysm will likely do nothing to raise Tyler’s work from its persistently middlebrow status with reviewers. Ever since the 19th century, when Nathaniel Hawthorne sought to separate himself from “the horde of scribbling women” and Herman Melville argued that it’s impossible to write an epic about a mouse, artists who work on a domestic canvas have been ignored or excoriated—or, worse, patted on the head indulgently—by serious critics. As a culture, we still have far to go before we understand that a theme like “War is hell” needn’t be illustrated by bodies exploding into bloody bits across the page. But Anne Tyler knows that a grieving mother’s quiet anger makes the point just as cogently, and her agony lasts far longer than the dead soldier’s.