Reading an Anne Tyler book is like snuggling into your warm bed when it’s raining and you have nowhere to be. There are no Big Bads, no scary, suspenseful moments, and no dramatic confrontations. Her books feel like a snapshot of the characters’ lives, which are mostly very ordinary. I adore them. The Accidental Tourist is the story of Macon Leary, a middle-aged man who writes travel guides for businessmen (and since it was written in 1985, they are indeed guides for businessmen, not businesspeople). His son Ethan was […]
On marriage, betrayal, independence and forgiveness
A Thousand Pardons is a sharp-edged yet surprisingly funny view of mid-life crisis, complacency in marriage, teen-age angst, and the dramatic turns these can taken when least expected. A privileged family in suburban upstate New York suddenly discovers serious fault lines in their lives when Helen realizes that the man she married so many years ago no longer exists. Oh, Ben drives to his law practice every day, sleeps in her bed, and eats her food, but interaction with her or their adopted teenaged daughter […]
Five Ishiguro tales about the human experience…and music
These are five lovely stories which all deal with very vulnerable individuals and the critical role of music in their lives. Ishiguro’s tales embrace a wide range of life’s challenges, from loss and loneliness to romance and recovery, to friendship and fulfillment. The recurrence of certain characters from one story to another lends a hint of continuity, almost like a piece of music with five movements and an occasionally recurrent theme. In one story, an aging singing legend takes his beloved on a final trip […]
Portrait of an Art Monster Marriage
Dept. Of Speculation is 46 pithy chapters that take up only 180 pages, composed entirely of short, aphoristic paragraphs and quotes that vaguely tell the story of a woman’s journey through adulthood. The characters are nameless: the wife, the husband, the daughter. The narrator, the Wife, starts as an aspiring Art Monster, and changes as she falls in love, gets married, has a daughter. The wife waxes poetic (or, aphoristic) about life’s catastrophes, from having a colicky baby, to a cheating husband, to a battle with bedbugs, […]
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