Far From Brooklyn

Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler

I think I first read Anne Tyler around 1981.  The book was “Morgan’s Passing” and I remember feeling skeptical about it and about Tyler.  I don’t recall much about the novel now except for a scene when a puppet at a children’s party asks, “Is there a doctor in the house?” because a female (behind the stage, holding her own puppet) is about to have a baby.

I also remember feeling an odd shock when, later in the book the female protagonist makes what is quite obviously the wrong choice for a husband.

As I say, I was skeptical but I must have been won over (maybe I felt I had better pay attention to John Updike, whose blurb graced every one of Tyler’s books back then: “Tyler is not merely good, she’s wickedly good,” whatever that means) because I went on to read some more Tyler, and then some more, and then some more.

It’s been some time since I’ve read her early books so I may be misremembering but it seems to me that most of her early work tended to hinge on girls – sometimes boys – making the wrong choice: that is, girls and  boys picking the wrong person to marry.  I think this was the case in “A Slipping Down Life,” and “Earthly Possessions,” and “Morgan’s Passing.”  Sometimes the choices were so wrong (Morgan’s Passing) that it jarred me out of the narrative.

Her later books have tended to focus on the other end of marriage – to show us the results of the choices of young people, right or wrong.  "Back When We Were Grownups" is certainly in that mold, following a widow, Rebecca, who as a college student had impulsively married an older man and stepped into his life, so different from her own, and then was “stuck” with that life thanks to familial responsibilities.

The book suffers from the usual Tyler indulgences – shading, once in a while, too far into the cutesie-pie (Rebecca’s “job” is throwing parties in her family’s run-down Baltimore row house), or pushing certain jokes too far (a house plant that is apparently so horribly ugly that it must be commented on by every character in the book – but at this point I am a committed Tylerite.  I want to visit Baltimore in her company whenever she will have me.  She is so unlike many of the authors I like best, but there she is among them nevertheless.