Back When We Were Grownups

Dear Sarah,

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I hope you didn't think I was suggesting yesterday that Anne Tyler is like Henry James. Good God! Anyone who seriously maintained such a position should be barred for life not only from reviewing books, but even from reading them.

However, we do seem to have a few authentic disagreements about Back When We Were Grownups, even if they mostly occur at the margins. Clearly, both of us enjoyed and admired the novel enormously, but I do nevertheless have some reservations about it--a few more than you seem to, I mean--and at the risk of widening this small rift between us, I'm going to keep yesterday's promise and mention them.

For one thing, I think the book is overpopulated for its length. Only 274 pages long, it nevertheless boasts a genuinely mammoth cast of characters; in the end, no more than four or five of them turn out to be much beyond a name and a couple of appended traits. They're mostly, in other words, what in theatrical circles are called "walk-ons," and therefore the reader goes through the effort of mastering quite a complex nexus of relationships without getting a big return on his investment. I was never persuaded Tyler really needed to deploy so many members of the Davitch clan; she manifestly felt she did, but she didn't then make the case by giving them enough to do. You and I discussed the relative absence of plot yesterday, and that absence obviously made her task more difficult--without interweaving story threads, there's very little structural work for all those characters to perform--but neither does she provide them individually with enough vivid scenes to bring them to sufficient life.

If I had to hazard a collegial guess about what produced this situation, I'd posit that Tyler thought it thematically necessary to surround Rebecca with a large mob of people who depend on her but don't give her much palpable in return, and also felt it would lend the book added texture if that mob possessed a comic sort of extravagant eccentricity, à la You Can't Take It With You. Both of which seem like valid artistic aims. But I'd further guess that the relatively modest scope of her story constrained the length of the book, and as a consequence, something had to give. A mistaken calculation, perhaps. The novel might actually have benefited from an additional 50 or even 100 pages. If you've gone to the trouble of casting all those characters, and invented intricate and idiosyncratic lives for them, and asked your readers to go to the trouble of understanding who they are, why not use them?

I also think, for all her habitual tact, Tyler still goes over the top once or twice. Will is a finely judged and intriguing character at first, a figure whose attractive and repellent qualities seem to hover in provocative equipoise. (The moment when, at dinner, he suddenly and unexpectedly blurts, "You broke my heart," is itself heart-breaking.) But when Tyler decides it's time for Rebecca to jettison him, the repellent aspects start to gain the upper hand in a way that strikes me as both a little facile and a little excessive. And Will's awful daughter Beatrice is so thoroughly, impossibly grotesque that she seems to dwell in another fictional realm entirely. (However, having said that--and without in any way taking it back--I also have to concede that her one big scene in the book is an extravagant masterpiece of comic Grand Guignol, and the book would be the poorer without it.)

And sometimes Tyler's estimable self-abnegation with regard to conventional narrative expectations just seems perverse. You mentioned yesterday the moment when NoNo complains about being saddled with a stepson and Rebecca bites her tongue to avoid answering tartly, and I agree with you that it's a frustrating moment. Why should she avoid answering tartly? Whom is she protecting? What deeper purpose is served by denying her--and us--the satisfaction of a tart reply, and in the process denying NoNo a useful reality check?

Well, that's just a micro-moment. But I'd extend a similar feeling of frustration to the whole question of Zeb. Zeb is rather underdeveloped as a character, to my mind, but still, everybody who reads this book seems to recognize early on that he and Rebecca are meant for each other. And in fact, in an anomalous flash of insight, even the opaque Will seems to notice it, which also tells us that Anne Tyler is aware of it, that the compatibility of the two characters is placed before us intentionally. So, why aren't they permitted to recognize it too? What is gained by Tyler's abstaining from even a hint that they might eventually get together? This decision seems more arbitrary and willful to me than, for example, the conventional, predictable coupling up of characters at the end of Jane Austen's novels. Yes, we've come to understand that Rebecca has a life--and a life that emotionally sustains her--within the chaotic, ambivalent embrace of the Davitch clan. But why does that life have to exclude romantic love?

And now, having lodged a few cavils about a book I truly admire, let me end by mentioning a small plot strand limned with such delicacy, such subtlety, such sensitivity, that one wouldn't dare alter a word: Peter, who is the son of Barry, who is the new fiance of NoNo, who is the stepdaughter of Rebecca (perhaps you can see what I mean about the mind-numbing number of characters and relationships, but never mind), in a handful of perfectly calibrated, utterly credible scenes, develops under Rebecca's unobtrusive solicitude from a shy, intimidated, speechless waif into an extraordinary little boy, no longer isolated but now securely connected to Rebecca and, by extension, to the Davitch family. Tyler does nothing to compel our attention to these scenes, makes no overt linkage between this little story and the novel as a whole, and yet it performs its task--the equivalent of Poppy's birthday speech, the one you and I disagree about--to subtle perfection. This is Tyler at her best, and I can't imagine anyone else doing it as well.

Friends?
Erik

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This week, Slate's Book Clubbers read Anne Tyler's Back When We Were Grownups. (Click here for a word on our format and here to buy the book.)

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