Posts Tagged ‘Anne Tyler’

“Tumble Tower” by Anne Tyler and Mitra Modarressi

Sunday, October 9th, 2011

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What’s this children’s book (published in 1993) all about? The Library of Congress Cataloguing-In Data Summary found on the book’s Copyright page dispatches the plot in one sentence:

“A very messy princess in a very tidy royal family has the opportunity to prove that there are advantages to not being neat.”

At the risk of coming across as a fuddy-duddy, I will point out that, amid the steady charms of Tumble Tower‘s story line (written by novelist supreme Anne Tyler) and the flow of its abundant illustrations (finely crafted by Tyler’s daughter Mitra Modarressi), some wrong notes occur.

A minor one is this: I’m not sure many boys would agree to don their sisters’ pajamas, as the little brother, Prince Thomas the Tidy, does here without a squabble.

A potentially important note is this: If you and your child still struggle over cleanliness issues — by which I mean matters of basic sanitation — it might be best to avoid this book, or at least be prepared to engage in lots of explaining, especially if your child absorbs messages in a literal fashion. In real life there is “cute-messy” and there is, well, let’s call it “dangerous-messy.” Here the significance of that distinction is mostly avoided.

Princess Molly’s bed is “all lumpy and knobby with half-finished books.” Oh? Are her bed sheets never changed? The princess is very happy to consume an old, half-eaten candy bar she finds hidden beneath a chair cushion. Hmmm . . . . is this, and the other abandoned food in the room, still fit to eat? The royal cat has given birth to six kittens amid the floor-tossed clothing. Is Molly’s bedroom this really the best location to this activity? The room is a minefield of toys and whatnot, every square inch of its floor covered with objects. Just how far do you suppose a parent, called to this child’s room in the night, would be able to walk across that floor without coming to personal harm? How soon would we hear screamed some very un-Tyleresque four letter words? Modarressi and Tyler do not see it as their job to suggest to the young reader/listener that there is anything amiss in this. It’s left largely to you, the parental reader, to encourage your child to think things out.

Which is, of course, as it should be.

Aside from these nits, the book is great fun to read.

Half of the pleasure of reading a good children’s book written by a great novelist comes from recognizing traces of the author’s adult preoccupations. And so it was fun for one Anne Tyler fan (me) to read “Tumble Tower.” I can see why Tyler was drawn to Messy Molly. Here was a chance to add a princess (royalty: talk about a quirky line of work!) from a family tagged with funny names (Molly is the daughter of King Clement the Clean and Queen Nellie the Neat) to the author’s growing list of protagonists whose personal space is full of clutter. Tyler views messiness, both the emotional and the material kind, as an inescapable condition of life. The tension between the comforts of clutter and a yearning to break free of it has been a fount of humor in most of her novels.

Veteran readers of Tyler know that when a clutterer meets an unclutterer, sparks fly. There’s Martine, the Rent-a-Back crew member in “A Patchwork Planet, who with rough efficiency de-clutters the homes of elderly and sometimes resistant pack-rats. Recall unhappy mom Delia Grinstead in “Ladder of Years” who decides to just up and leave her family. Is that ultimate act of uncluttering one’s life, or no? Remember, too, the title character in Morgan’s Passing, who instructs his daughter in the same stern manner as King Clement the Clean: “You would be surprised at how many things are non-essential. Throw everything away. All of it! Simplify!”

The Summer 1992 edition of The Virginia Quarterly Review contained an essay on Anne Tyler written by Patricia Rowe Willrich, who for several years engaged in a correspondence and literary friendship with the reclusive author. Willrich relates that, on a continuum from messy to neat, Tyler is not a saver, let alone a hoarder: “Her old stone home in Baltimore is organized and spare. The living room and dining room, with oriental rugs and a few pieces of furniture, are uncluttered. Floor to ceiling bookcases are full, but neatly organized. When someone gives Tyler a new book, she gives one away.”

So there you have it: Anne Tyler is Queen Nellie the Neat.

Final note: A dozen years after releasing “Tumble Tower” in 1993, the mother-daughter team of Tyler and Modarressi reunited to produce their second children’s book, Timothy Tugbottom Says No!.

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A version of this review appears on Amazon, here.

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“The Little House” by Virginia Lee Burton

Saturday, August 13th, 2011

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In what ways do great children’s books influence the culture? In the era of Harry Potter the main route is via commodification. In an earlier era, influence might have taken an indirect path, mediated by contemporary literature.

Take the case of Virginia Lee Burton’s  “The Little House,” a children’s book published in 1942 that received immediate (and lasting) popular and critical success. Consider the effect its text and illustrations may have had on the imaginations of Anne Tyler and Arthur Miller.

Anne Tyler’s House

I came to read “The Little House” only recently, after learning it is Anne Tyler’s “life long favorite picture book.” Tyler explained her love of the tale in an essay published in The New York Times Book Review in 1986 entitled “Why I Still Treasure ‘The Little House’.” Tyler vividly remembers her mother reading the book to her at age four. When she became a mother herself, Tyler enjoyed reading it to her two daughters. She guesses she’s given away “several dozen copies” of the book as gifts to new babies. In a more recent written interview conducted in 2004, Tyler said she has long been in awe of how Virginia Lee Burton managed to say “everything possible about change and loss and the passage of time.” Plainly this is an example of  like attracting like, for in her own 18 novels Tyler has done the same.

In her essay Tyler mentions one thing that’s always eluded her:

I have pondered for years, for decades, over the final picture of the Little House. She’s on a hill again; she’s surrounded by apple trees again–but there is no longer a pond! It’s as if the story ended, “She lived happily ever after–but not quite.” Could it have been just an oversight? A failure on the part of the author-artist to recognize the importance of a pond? Or did she intend to remind us of the grim facts? “You can go back, but never all the way back,” she may have been saying. “What is done can be undone, but never completely.”

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The Little House (note the pond to the left) before an expanding city overruns it (page 9):

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The Little House after it is moved to a new perch in the country (page 39):

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I see this final picture differently. Only the house and its immediate lawn survive because there is only so much room in God’s heaven. Yes, I interpret the story as a Christian allegory.

On the first page of “The Little House” the reader meets a father who is described as “the man who built her [the house] so well.” With an air of omniscience he predicts the house will live forever. His prophesy includes a stern and very Biblical sounding admonition: the house “shall never be sold for gold or silver.” I think we are meant to understand this as a warning against betrayal.

A second voice appears on page 32. Many years have passed. The house has been swallowed up by the city and is abandoned. We sense we are coming to the fulfillment of the story. Or call it “her-story,” as Burton, who created all the illustrations, wittily indicates below the front door mat on the cover illustration. This new voice belongs to one of the father’s offspring. In a clever bit of misdirection on Burton’s part, it is not the father’s son, but a more distant (female) descendant, “the great-great-granddaughter of the man who built the Little House so well.” She is here to fulfill a destiny, however. She will bring salvation to a soul true and pure (we are told that while the house is “broken … crooked … shabby,” it is “just as good a house as ever underneath.”).

Study the pictures on pages 31 and 33:

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Whatever the condition of its soul, surely these are images of death. Executed in tones of gray and black (see how the fading pink of the first picture expires in the final shot), the pictures include a cross made of wood planks marking the door between dead-eyed windows.

The great-great-granddaughter’s mission is to be the house’s travel guide to what she calls “just the place” — an afterlife in a revived Eden that simulates the house’s original home set in nature. The journey is depicted in a two-page spread on pages 34-35. It is a scene akin to a traffic-stopping funeral procession:

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Look closely again at the after-the-move illustration further above — the “after salvation” picture (my preferred label) that has always given Tyler pause because of the omission of a nearby pond. Notice how Burton re-conceives the house’s surroundings as a protective island of contentment. The image is gently rounded and isolated in white space, appropriate to a vision or dream. There is a free-floating — and, to my eyes, heavenly — aura to the picture. That the house is no longer earth-bound is also suggested by how the image and text are positioned on the page. Of all the illustrations in the book, those found on the final three pages — 38 and 39 (which I view as a connected spread) and 40 — are the only places where the text is allowed to appear beneath the image. The effect is telling. The image is lifted up. It rises above our focus as we read, as if to say the Little House is no longer among the creatures here below.

You may scoff at this interpretation. I suspect Anne Tyler would too. But I think we should leave open the possibility that, within her own masterful explorations of “change and loss and the passage of time,” the caution that Tyler exhibits — a sentimental reticence to stir up all that lies at the dark bottom of the river of time — may be traced back to a comfortable understanding of the world (“rescue is possible; conditions can be reversed”) she constructed when, as a child, she listened to her mother read “The Little House.”

Arthur Miller’s House

Let me turn from armchair psychologizing to pure speculation. Consider next the case of Arthur Miller, on whom the influence of “The Little House” is, as far as I know, undocumented. Will you hear me out?

In the middle section of “The Little House” Virginia Lee Burton describes and provides illustrations of the menacing encroachment of a city, bent on swallowing up a pastoral setting. What I ask is this:

Is it a coincidence that just a few years after the release and popularity of “The Little House” and at a time when Miller and his wife might well have been accumulating children’s books to read to their young daughter, the playwright chose to write stage directions for “Death of a Salesman” that share not only the dread but the specific details of Virginia Lee Burton’s vision of the city?

As a prelude before the curtain rises on “Death of a Salesman,” Miller offers the audience what an evocation in music reminiscent of the bucolic setting in initial pages of “The Little House.” He specifies: “A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon.”

Fast forward: the horizon has disappeared. Here is Burton’s illustration of the urban reality (page 19 of “The Little House”):

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And here is how Miller sets the scene for his tragedy:

“The curtain rises. Before us is the Salesman’s house. We are aware of towering, angular shapes behind it, surrounding it on all sides.  … As more light appears we see a solid vault of apartment houses around the small, fragile-seeming home. An air of the dream clings to the place, a dream rising out of reality.”

Burton’s lament  (“No one wanted to live in her and take care of her any more”) is echoed by Willy Loman: “Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s nobody to live in it.”

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[A review of “The Little House” is posted on Amazon, here.]

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“The Coffins of Little Hope” by Timothy Schaffert

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

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Timothy Schaffert’s “The Coffins of Little Hope” is a bang-up novel: smart, funny, sad, and magical.

The book’s intelligence, its melancholy, its subtle, down-home humor, and its manifold charms, are exhibited in many forms. There’s the unsentimental depiction of small rebellions in a small town in Nebraska, where “everything falls apart.” There’s a page-turning mystery about the fate of a missing 11-year-old girl named Lenore who may or may not be real (yes, the name is an allusion to Poe, and not the only one in the book). There’s a clever subplot involving the secret publication of the final volume of a best-selling series of Young Adult Gothic novels whose plucky protagonists, Miranda and Desiree, have captivated many in the community. There’s a light, fairy tale dusting that covers the town and its inhabitants, casting a spell that gently dislocates the reader’s sense of what exactly is going on. There is, front and center, the rueful yet wise voice of the novel’s 83-year-old narrator, Essie Myles, matriarch of the town’s newspaper and writer of its obituaries. Her spirit, simultaneously sinking (“I’ve come grim-reaping”) and unsinkable (“I’m happy to be sad”), dominates the book.

Let me add a few observations to the growing praise the novel is receiving:

The narrator, her philosophy and her family

The first is to note the rare quality of the narrator’s voice. In contemporary fiction the outlook of youth or middle-age predominates, and so it is refreshing to come across a successful novel grounded in the perspective of old age. Over the course of what Essie calls her year of “minor havoc,” the two people she holds most dear — her 38-year-old grandson, Doc, and her 14-year old great-granddaughter, Tiff — grow and change. But Essie remains, steadfastly, Essie. This means the book traces the slow unfolding of her essential self, contradictions and all.

Essie combines the wisdom of age with a writer’s appreciation for how contradictory terms often appear in conjunction. It is through Essie that Schaffert makes sport of this oxymoron called life. Not a page goes by without some remark about incongruities, pluses and minuses, the unavoidable either/or of living. Essie sees a man’s “gruff demeanor, which disguised his sweet, soft heart.” She observes how middle age has rendered Lenore’s mother “wasted and lovely both.” It frustrates her to realize that “now a parent can be doing the wrong thing even when she’s doing the right thing.” She spies a man “strumming an unplugged electric guitar.” At a funeral of an old friend, while sitting with her remaining pals, she confesses, “we were nearly moved to tears by our own lack of emotion.” So here is a test:  If you grow bored around the elderly when they start in talking about their philosophy of life, steer clear of “Coffins.” If, on the other hand, you miss a grandmother who stood her ground, spoke her mind and remained sharp to the end (and you miss her), then I think you’ll get hooked by this book.

A second notable aspect of “The Coffins of Little Hope” is how much it is about family. Essie begins Chapter 8 with a chart of her family tree. She is obliged to label it, “Little Family Tree,” since it has been reduced to only four living members. The most poignant relationship in the book is the loving bond between Essie and Tiff (though we are aware of the gap of seven decades between them). At times I was reminded of the sundered, incomplete families found in the novels of John Irving and Anne Tyler’s novels.

Shades of John Irving, shades of Anne Tyler

The Irving connection is felt in the violent accidents that chopped off limbs from Essie’s family tree, the sort of shocks that are a routine part of Irving’s generational sagas. At one point in “Coffins,” Tiff mistakenly hears the word “undertow” — which recalls the “undertow/under toad/unter tod” motif in “The World According to Garp.” Of course, no one can best Irving when it comes to being an “author lover” who must, in every novel, include a main character and/or supporting characters who are writers of some sort: novelists, journalists, children’s book authors, diarists, family historians, etc. (On this point, check out the chart of “Recurring Themes” in the Wikipedia article on John Irving, here.) In “Coffins,” Schaffert launches a challenge to Irving, marshaling the obit-writing Essie AND the reclusive Wilton Muscatine (author of those Miranda and Desiree books) AND the dead but still resonating lady novelist of the Plains, Myrtle Kingsley Fitch AND Lenore’s mother Daisy whose alternative M&D manuscript Muscatine covets.

As for the connection to Anne Tyler, Schaffter’s examination of Midwestern family dynamics made me think of Tyler’s Baltimore which, as portrayed by her in novel after novel, somehow still feels like a small-town. Schaffert even includes a version of Tyler’s trademark comic scenes — the awkward moments that arise when a member of a tight-knit family dares to bring home to a family meal someone new he’s met. Other echoes of Tyler are found in the early mid-life crisis of Essie’s grandson Doc; the nostalgia some characters express about a past filled with better days; and some characters’ clasp of the quotidian in hopes of holding time’s swift hand back. A kinship between Schaffert and Tyler is also evident in the finale to “Coffins,” which brings the reader to the cusp of a wedding (a ploy both writers smartly steal from Jane Austen). And I could have sworn I was reading a page out of Tyler when Schaffert closes chapter 54 with this “she-leaves-in-a-huff” ending to a family breakfast:

“Penny for your thoughts'” Ivy [Essie’s grand-daughter and Tiff’s mother] said.

“I’ve always hated that expression,” [Essie] said. “It’s aggressive. And what’s worse, it’s disguised as a little piece of friendly adorableness in needlepoint stitch.”

“Wow, tell us what you really think,” Ivy said.

“I hate that expression even worse,” I said. “Practically for the same reasons.”

I then caught sight of them all exchanging quick glances and raised eyebrows, as if they were collectively declaring me a senile crank. “You think I don’t see that?” I said, making matters worse.

So, if Schaffert’s book tour should bring him to Washington, DC, and if the event allows for questions, I’ll bring to the microphone this one: “Mr. Schaffer, what do John Irving and Anne Tyler mean to you?”

An abundant writer

If there is a fault to be found in “The Coffins of Little Hope” it is that Schaffert’s elliptical path travels through all too many stations, its narrative has all too many diversions. So the reader must be willing to encounter a variety of riches, for that is what you get with Schaffert. On every page, he displays an easy wit and imagination, relayed through an engaging writing style. Once again, it is Essie who provides the starring “voice,” best of all when she unspools regional colloquialisms and some bad puns. She’s embarrassed by her “disgraceful fur coat, a mink that had long been on its last legs.” She describes her grand-daughter’s escape to Paris: “Ivy had just up and left.” She admonishes herself for an “infantile need to know everything before everyone else.” Schaffert’s applies an economical hand to character descriptions and scene-setting: “Ivy mourned her parents by falling in love, dangerously so, with a man beautiful but demented, and she then became pregnant.” Someone else’s daughter “had married poorly, ruined her life early on, and thickened herself on bad food from drive-through windows.” Note, too, the author’s tidy parallelisms: The Miranda and Desiree series comprises eleven books and “Coffins” contains eleven “Parts.”  (BTW, there is a webpage devoted to M&D, here.) On page one, Esther Myles informs us that if she were to reduce her full name to just one letter, the surviving letter would be “S” — a condensation also befitting the author.

This guy is good and this book is a delight.

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[A shortened version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.]


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“Noah’s Compass” by Anne Tyler

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

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I remember emerging from a New York City art museum some years ago after spending an hour looking at paintings in a Richard Estes exhibition. Estes is a photo-realist painter known for his meticulously detailed canvasses of urban environments. As I hit the sidewalk and walked to Penn Station, I noticed that the avenues, vehicles, buildings, sky — the entire city — looked different. I was seeing the world with more sharply focused vision, a carry-over from time spent immersed in Estes’ art. The most striking effect was my heightened awareness of the unique light that fills the streets of Manhattan.  It was a luxurious effect.

The same feeling comes over me whenever I finish a new novel by Anne Tyler. There is one difference, though. Tyler’s art engenders not only new perceptions of the everyday physical environment, but also a more generous understanding of human interactions, of personal relationships.

“Noah’s Compass” is relatively short, just 277 pages in the British edition that I read (published by Chatto & Windus; Knopf will release the American edition on January 5, 2010). There are critics who disparage Tyler as a play-it-safe miniaturist. They say she avoids grappling with the Big Themes of existence and death; she’s stuck in the quotidian. Yet Liam Pennywell, the protagonist of “Noah’s Compass,” at one point observes how “we live such tangled, fraught lives . . . but in the end we die like all the other animals and we’re buried in the ground and after a few more years we might as well not have existed.” Could this passage be a bone Tyler is throwing to the nay-sayers?  Perhaps.  I think the critics are tiresome.  What I am more sure of, and more interested in, is that “Noah’s Compass” finds the author in full command of her craft. Tyler shares with the Big Theme guys (authors such as Tolstoy, Joyce, Mann, Camus) a rare power to convey what it feels like to be alive.

One of the book’s pleasures is how its hold on the reader gains strength page after page. It starts in familiar Tyler territory, introducing a main character who’s living half a life. The story unfolds in comedia dell’arte fashion, as Liam is beset by the women in his life, who intrude upon and occupy his present as well as his remembrances.  Incidents range from tiny to grand, from equivocal to harrowing. Some leave wounds.  Complications blend the farcical and tragic. Inveterate Tyler readers will sense from the opening pages that Liam may — or may not — find himself in a different external state by the close of the tale. But he himself will be different, and we too. The book’s final chapter takes us to a pre-school for three-year-olds. Could there be a more suitable stage upon which to close out the narrative with a modest summing up?

There are no solutions to the mysteries of why people are the way they are. Life offers no answers. Yet there are, in Tyler’s universe, lessons to be had, more things for Liam to learn:

“It came as news to [Liam] that small children maintained such a firm social structure. They played consistent roles in their dealings with each other; they held fierce notions of justice; they formed alliances and ad hoc committees and little vigilante groups. Lunches were parodies of grownups’ dinner parties, just with different conversational topics. Danny held forth at length on spaghetti’s resemblance to earthworms, and some of the little girls said, “Eww!” and pushed their plates away, but then Hannah — first clearing her throat importantly — delivered a discourse on a chocolate-covered ant she’d once eaten, while shy little Jake watched everybody admiringly from the sidelines.”

What inevitably happens when reading the best of Tyler’s novels happened, this time, when I was half-way through the book. Tyler aficionados know what I’m talking about. You come upon a magical passage; read a perfect description of a person or place or encounter; listen to a precisely-pitched stretch of dialog; absorb a paragraph that expresses a sentiment often thought “but ne’er so well expressed” — and at those moments you think to yourself, How the hell did she do that?  Let me read that again. Let me mark these spots. But then you find yourself marking up every page. The exercise turns futile, redundant: the entire book is of a piece.

I love the Baltimore dialect (“let me skootch this footstool around”), the apt similes (“the marble treads were worn down in the middle like old soap bars”), and the Updike-like attention to detail. Here is Tyler describing a working-class neighborhood of 1940s-vintage cottages:

“There was an abundance of lawn ornaments — plaster gnomes and fawns and families of ducks, birdbaths, windmills, reflective aluminum gazing globes, wooden cutouts of girls in sunbonnets bending over the flower beds with their wooden watering cans.  Liam’s father’s yard had a miniature pony cart planted with red geraniums and hitched to a plaster pony.”

Rhymes, echos, and recurrences abound, usually in service to Tyler’s ever-wise examination of human psychology. Virtually everything has metaphorical significance. The tension of yes and no, true and false, is non-stop. This is life. On his first encounter with Eunice (who will become a love interest) Liam considers her behavior: “Either she was admirably at ease anywhere or she suffered from a total lack of discrimination.” Eunice’s habit of repeatedly calling new acquaintances by their first name is later echoed by another character, and as a reader you wonder, did one person influence the other, or was this something they shared in common from the start, and if the latter, doesn’t that suggest these two are better off remaining paired, not separated?

At points things veer toward the heavy lot of Job, as when a troubled Liam asks himself, “How had things reached such a state? But it wasn’t his fault. He honestly didn’t think he should be shouldering the blame for this.” This brings to mind the famous opening sentence of a famous Big Theme book: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.” In Tyler’s hands, the serious is leavened with the comical; Liam comes across as a bit of a schlemiel. I was interested in Tyler’s handling of religion (one of Liam’s daughters is a born-again Christian). On the evidence of this book, I suspect Tyler herself is a skeptic. Although she loves her characters and watches admiringly over them from the sidelines, Tyler lets no one off lightly.  No one escapes unscathed.

Let me add, the final sentence of “Noah’s Compass” is perfect.

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[UPDATE (01-09-2010):  A revised version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.]

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Note: The book cover of the British edition is above. Below is the cover of the American edition. Neither image will make sense to the reader of the novel. Although Liam Pennywell has a grandson, no mention is made of the two of them going to the beach. Neither do I recall any episode in which a character, swaddled in a plaid blanket, reads from an old illustrated volume. Oh, well; both are pleasing covers.

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