For many years Anne Tyler was among my very favorite authors. I cooled on her a while back when trying unsuccessfully to read The Amateur Marriage (just couldn't bear seeing the mess those characters made of their lives). But when browsing the library for my next audiobook I was glad to try this story about the cultural interface between Americans and immigrants. Two families meet by chance in the arrivals area at the Baltimore airport. Bitsy and Brad are there to accept a Korean baby that they're adopting, and so are Sami and Ziba (Iranian immigrants). At the moment everyone's focus is on the two little girls, but Brad takes note of the other adoptive family and proposes that they stay in touch. Time passes, and they not only stay in touch but become close friends, despite distinct cultural and personality differences. Bitsy in particular can be hard to take, but surely without her determined focus on establishing traditions, such as an annual "Arrival Party" to commemorate their shared special date, and organizing a dizzying succession of other contrived events, the relationship never would have gotten off the ground.) And yet neither these adults nor the growing children are ever more than supporting characters. Given that the kids are at the center of it all, I would have liked to see them figure more prominently in the story. There is certainly occasion for them to take center stage, especially when Bitsy and Brad adopt a second Asian baby, who appears at first to have developmental problems (not that anyone seems particularly anxious on that score). But no, the main characters are grandparents on both sides--Bitsy's father Dave and Sami's mother Maryam, both widowed.Because I read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom not long ago, I now perceive a similarity between these two authors that hadn't occurred to me previously. Tyler's characters tend to be maybe a little more conventional and domestic, but in attempting to relate to one another they encounter similar problems.In this story I sometimes grew weary of the domestic particulars of planning and hosting multiple social gatherings, but often when things started to drag I was touched by moments of genuine interaction.And most of that interaction occurs between the two older folks. Maryam (wonderfully rendered in the audio version by the way) is clearly an attractive and sensitive woman. Dave notices. Suddenly there's a whiff of romance in the air. But perhaps more than the younger generation, Maryam wrestles with the perception that Americans always seem so "self-vaunting, self-advertising," confident in "the assumption that they had the right to an unfair share of the universe." She even objects when Dave shows genuine interest in Iranian traditions and food, complaining that, like all Americans, he's edging her out and appropriating everything.Everybody's views get an airing. Yes, Americans can be brash and overbearing. The Americans in this story even recognize that. Iranians too can be "loud," Maryam admits to herself, and it's understood why strangers in public places nervously edge away from people of Middle Eastern descent.This is rich material. I should know, since later today I'm going to a cross-cultural party with a group of Chinese-American couples to which my wife and I have belonged for almost 20 years. It's handled very well, and Tyler's conclusion is lovely.
As I was reading this book, even when well into it, when almost done and racing to the end, I came to a section that made me judge it as uneven.Then I finished. For a minute I just sat there. Then I burst into sobs. I had just been complaining the other day that I couldn't understand catharsis from classic tragedy, but this is different. What is it about Anne Tyler's books?It's been a while since I've read one. The Amateur Marriage hit me pretty hard.In this book, two families who are both adopting Korean babies meet and their destinies become intertwined. One family consists of white upper-middle-class Americans and the other of Iranian-Americans. The focus is on several of the characters, but especially on Maryam, a late-middle-aged adoptive grandmother from the Iranian family. She's been in this country 39 years, but typically people whom she meets will start the conversation by asking how long she's been here. She sees her feelings of alienation and difference through the lens of her foreignness, and that's poignantly compared and contrasted with the experiences of the others. Anne Tyler's particular gift is to shine the spotlight on her characters and make them real.This week I've had two narrative experiences about badly misunderstood women. I saw the movie Delores Claiborne (based on the Stephen King book, which I haven't read); in it, Kathy Bates plays a woman everyone thinks is a bitch and a murderer, too. (She's married to a wife abuser. Author Stephen King and actor David Strathairn each do excellent abusive husbands.) In Digging to America, Maryam is thought to be an imperious and haughty woman. Her daughter-in-law's family and even her son refer to her as "Khanom:" "Madame." Her son himself speaks of her in a critical manner. As the plot progresses, harsher attitudes emerge. From inside, the tension may be risk versus safety, but the dimension of interest to me here is that of judgment versus mercy. With that, I'm back to my speculations about classical tragedy and my difficulty with classical tragedy as a source of catharsis. My hunch is that the catharsis associated with classical tragedy has something to do with group, not individual, catharsis. For all that we can imagine seeing the world only through our individualism, that individualism is a very late development. I'm speculating that the catharsis associated with classical tragedy has to do with purging some human but undesirable element from the group. The group commiserates with the suffering of the "purgee" but nevertheless is on board with the judgment that the problem trait must go. For me, though, catharsis comes through the recognition that the person with the trait viewed externally as bad, ultimately is not bad. That conclusion was mistaken. Through some change that takes place in both the one being targeted and those who were passing judgment, a new and even better equilibrium is reached, one that doesn't require anyone to be sacrificed.I'm on some new territory here, but I think that is getting closer to what I mean by a redemptive story and one that results in catharsis!It ain't easy being human. But joy is possible.
What do You think about Digging To America (2006)?
مهاجرت، غربت، فرهنگ، زبان، تنهایی، خانواده و زندگی.. همه این موارد در این کتاب بارها و بارها از فکر تک تک شخصیت ها میگذرد.. فکر کردنی که ناگزیر به انجام آن هستید. بارها خودم را به جای مریم تصور کردم و احساس کردم اگر روندِ زندگیم اینگونه می شد حتما زنِ میانسالی همچون مریم می شدم.. با همان خصوصیات و ضرافت ها.. حتی اندکی هم برای اتفاقِ در پایانِ کتاب ذوق و شوق داشتم آنقدر که مریم بودم..حداقل برایِ من، داستان خیلی روندِ تکراری و قابل پیش بینی ای داشت، شاید برای آمریکایی ها رمانی راجع به یک خانواده ایرانی که سال هاست در آمریکان و رابطه نزدیکشون با یک خانواده آمریکایی، جذاب باشه.
—eliafen
I'm not 1005 an Anne Tyler fan and at times I grow tired of her, find her overrated. But I did like this book, and found some parts of the storyline quite compelling. Its basically a story about what constitutes an American today: how and/or why one becomes an American, and what sort of American that would be. In the story, two very different families--one 'Anglo' and one first and second generation Iranian immigrants, each adopt a baby girl from Korea. How the family members of each family group react to his event as time goes by, how they change or how they struggle with change, is the tension line but the true protagonist is Maryam, the Iranian gandmother of one of the little Korean girls. Maryam, a rebel in her native Iran before the Iranian 1979 Revolution, came to the US as a young bride to meet her Iranian doctor husband in Baltimore. How she did and did not adapt, her nostalgia for Iran, her resentment towards America and some American characteristics, make up the bulk of the true dramatic conflict.And herein lay the biggest problem for me: the novel is told in several points of views. Not only did many of these POVs not work for me (especially one of the Korean girl's POV, since in no way did I buy that as the voice of a supposedly 8 or 9 year old) but Maryam's POV is so powerful and her conflict so truly compelling that I kept wanting the other character's storylines to end so i could get back to Maryam, who really did hold my attention.On the other hand, I found the ending satisfying and, having many close Iranian friends, feel nothing but admiration for Anne Tyler's ability to transmit this different culture to us, and to inhabit Maryam's head, when as an Iranian woman her life experience must be so different from Tyler's own.
—Maia
I appreciated this as my first experience with Tyler’s special voice and genius at portraying the rhythms and dynamics of American domestic life. The tale involves a comparison of two Baltimore families who adopt Korean toddler girls, one a “typical” American clan and the other second generation Iranians. At the arrival of the babies at the airport, the cultural differences in response to the event set the stage for the rest of the book. Whereas the Donaldsons celebrate the arrival with a clan of dozens and recordings by multiple videocams, the Yazdans are more matter-of-fact in participating with only the young spouses and the husband’s mother Maryam. When the anniversary of their child’s arrival comes about, the big hearted Donaldson’s remember the Yazdans and invite them to a lavish “arrival party”. The story follows the development of a deep friendship between the two couples and parts of their extended families over about a decade, covering the period after the Iranian hostage crisis to the years after 9-11.But the story has almost no focus on politics. It is more about the sense of what it personally takes to feel a part of American culture. Cultural differences and misunderstandings emerge and are largely surmounted. Tyler loves her characters and gardens their development with care. Some readers may be frequently bored with the sparse plot elements in favor of everyday family issues. For example, there is about a 50 page section on how the Donaldsons handled the weaning of their daughter from her pacifier addiction, which ends with a party in which all the family members send the dozens of pacifiers off to a contrived fairy by balloons. The heart of Maryam is effectively the heart of the story. After nearly four decades of struggling to “be” an American and to achieve self-reliance in her widowhood, her identity remains tied up with her foreignness, and she is very reticent to follow through on her affections for elder Dave in the Donaldson clan. These two quotes capture the essence of her quandary:You can start to believe that your life is defined by your foreignness. You think everything would be different if only you belonged. ‘If only I were back home,’ you say, and you forget that you wouldn’t belong there either, after all these years. It wouldn’t be home at all anymore.Americans are all larger than life. You think that if you keep company with them you will be larger too, but then you see that they’re making you shrink; they’re expanding and edging you out. I could feel myself slipping away.
—Michael
