Most of the action takes place in, or around, the large family home, once lovingly constructed by Red’s father for a client. Abby, when not busy collecting the strays and misfits she meets, frets about her prodigal son. Denny, the fourth, has tended to be the centre of attention, largely because of his absences. They are both getting older, and this has alarmed three of their grown children. Her husband, a building contractor, as was his father before him, is a good deal quieter, a sketchily drawn character, if an able foil for Abby. She sees the heroic and the hopeful, the defeated and the inevitable – often not all that nice, but real.Ībby is a talkative, very busy retired social worker who has lived her life being involved – so involved that she generates a particular brand of chaos. But Tyler has an instinctive feel for light humour and kindly irony.Ībove all she has figured out how we behave in most situations. There have been times, as in A Patchwork Planet (1998), when her style has seemed formulaic, even contrived. What she does is articulate an understanding of experience. Tyler does not write beautiful sentences, although there is an eloquent sermon in this novel, and rarely offers memorable images. At her best – as in her ninth novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) her 10th, The Accidental Tourist (1985) her 11th, Breathing Lessons (1988) and the recent masterwork The Beginner's Goodbye (2012), her 19th novel – Tyler renders the stuff of the ordinary into an art so subtle as to affect the way a reader will henceforth consider life.
It has taken time – Tyler's first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published more than 50 years ago – but if ever a writer has perfected her craft, it is Tyler. Her work is not read but inhabited, and by her readers as well as her characters. There is no limit to the superlatives that Tyler inspires. Or, put more accurately, Tyler, with a foot in the north and a foot in the south through her Virginian childhood, has come to dominate the theme of family, most specifically the American family. Family has dominated the work of Anne Tyler.
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