Anne Tyler has run so much water over the elements of her quirky Baltimore families that she risks becoming the high priestess of homeopathic fiction. Now, with "The Amateur Marriage," the bittersweet perception that infused her earlier work is so attenuated that only the most faithful fans will be able to taste it.Knopf is planning an enormous 300,000 copy first printing - something like opening a movie in 4,000 theaters - but "The Amateur Marriage" shouldn't be anyone's first experience with Tyler's work. It has to be enjoyed in the nostalgic glow of older classics like "St. Maybe," "The Accidental Tourist," and "Breathing Lessons." Indeed, the novel's elliptical structure encourages readers to fill in important scenes themselves, preferably by remembering how gracefully Tyler used to do that heavy lifting for us.The story opens with one of those legendary encounters that sets a dozen lives in new directions. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor, and the streets of this Polish neighborhood in Baltimore are filled with young men eager to enlist, when a group of girls brings Pauline into Mrs. Anton's little grocery store for a bandage. In that moment, her son, Michael, is smitten.Tyler displays all her usual skill with the tragic comedy of this relationship. Pauline's control over her bland, young boyfriend is complicated by Michael's slavish devotion to his charm-free mother. He can't tell her that he and Pauline are dating, or that Pauline has motivated him to enlist, or that they're getting married. But Pauline can tell everyone everything. "Pauline felt entitled to spill anything that came into her head while Michael measured out every word. She was brimming with energy - a floor-pacer, a foot-jiggler, a finger-drummer - while he was slow and plodding and secretly somewhat lazy."From the start, their romance is pocked with bitter quarrels "that simply materialized, developing less from something they said than from who they were, by nature." Pauline's anger blows up frequently, but in the process blows away. Michael, on the other hand, clutches his wrath to him and nurses it till it grows to lethal intensity. Soon Michael is asking himself, "Was it possible to dislike your own wife?" And Pauline is wondering if "all wives believe they had chosen the wrong course."So, to review, she's the passionate wife who wants to talk about her feelings, and he's the quiet husband who keeps his emotions bottled up, and together they move through a series of arguments lifted from a cover story in Redbook magazine.Yes, that's unfair: A story about good friends who "never should have married each other" can have value no matter how common that situation is, and surely "The Amateur Marriage" sometimes produces intimate touches of personal agony as light and indelible as smoke. But too often, it fails to rise above the stereotypes that inform its premise, and the whole thing trudges along, without even the usual touches of quirkiness that individualize the families in Tyler's best fiction.This problem grows more pressing in subsequent chapters. Pauline and Michael raise three unhappy children in the '60s. Two of them try to maintain peace in the family; the third one rebels against her parents' uptight, suburban culture.Pauline and Michael "didn't know what to do. They felt they were in way over their heads." So, they blame each other. "There's no need for melodrama," he tells her. "Well, at least I'm not a block of wood, like some others I could name," Pauline responds. And then Tyler writes, "And so on, and so on, and so on," as though to admit that she finds all this just as thread worn as we do.Unfortunately, the book's structure, the way it jumps over complicated years of development in these characters' lives, leaves us with a lot of "and so on, and so on, and so on." The night of their 30th wedding anniversary, for instance, Michael sums up the missing years in a way that flattens them into sitcom clichés: "All this shouting and weeping and carrying on, stalking off, slamming doors, kicking furniture, throwing my clothes out the window, locking me out of the house...." After another eight-year jump, Tyler brings us up to speed by telling us that life is "preferable to how it used to be, of course (the tears and recriminations, the clatter of slammed-down receivers)." This is storytelling by number.Fuming alone one night, rehearsing Michael's flaws, Pauline thinks that "she could read him like a book." But that's the problem: We all can, and it's a book we've read many times before.http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0106/p1...
The Amateur Marriage begins with its terrific title. With those three words Tyler forces so many questions to the fore: Whose marriage isn't amateur? What would a professional marriage be like? Is amateurism the element of doom in all marriages, or just this one, the one Tyler describes?In her novel, Tyler has Michael meet Pauline just after Pearl Harbor is attacked. Like everyone just out of high school in Baltimore, Michael rushes to enlist. This foreshortens the time available for Michael and Pauline to get to know one another really well (not much of an option in those days, anyway) and leads to several decades of mismatch. Their oldest daughter, Lindy, runs away in her late teens and stays disappeared for twenty-nine years. When she returns, she sums up the relationship between Michael and Pauline as like glass and ice...similar in appearance but different in essence.Michael is methodical, steady, withdrawn, introverted. Pauline is inventive, curious, expressive, and extraverted. She gets through life by quarreling and then moving on. Michael doesn't move on. The quarrels mount up. One quarrel too many does it. She says he can leave if he wants, and that's exactly what he wants. Their marriage has been hell (not helped by having that run-away daughter who also abandoned a 3-year old they had to raise) and he wants out. For real.This novel reminds me of several similar novels: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, American Pastoral by Philip Roth, and different elements of John Updike's Rabbit books. They all have a rise and fall that matches rhythms in American life. They all take you through time, decades, and create the sensation that you have lived with their principal characters and will miss them, in some cases a great deal.I'd say that Pauline and Michael are among the least inherently interesting lead characters among these books, but one understands their impulse to marry, to have someone to hold onto, and then their process of discovery: I don't get along with this person, I'm never happy, I never say the right thing, I don't know what to do. The radical inflection in the narrative is Lindy's disappearance, and it turns out, predictably, that she fled in large part because she thought her family was one huge trap. At least this pushes Pauline and Michael to work together in raising "Pagan," Lindy's abandoned son, for a while before their divorce, and in the process they discover moments of affection and inspiration that are good, not bad...just as not all of their marriage was bad, some of it was good...just not good enough.Typically Anne Tyler sets her novels in Baltimore, a city I've lived in, too. She uses the setting well and traces the flight to the suburbs that occurred in the fifties perfectly. Her writing is steady and firm. She makes good use of short sentences in both exposition and dialogue without creating an excessively spare effect. Her compassion for these troubled souls is real yet irreverent; she moves smoothly from the pre-divorce life of the parents to the post-divorce life of the parents to the life of the next generation and even the generation after that. Ultimately she allows Michael to find a soulmate. Pauline doesn't fare so well. This may reflect some kind of moral balancing on Tyler's part. After all, Pauline got more out of life than Michael when she was alive, and he needs more time to catch up, which he never will.
What do You think about The Amateur Marriage (2006)?
This book was recommended to me by a Christian woman who said that it taught her a lot about her own marriage. Perhaps it's not my place to judge, but I walked away from this book thinking that its message was one of anti-marriage or at least one of not getting married too young. Well, I myself was a very young bride--22 and I'll be the first to tell you marriage is work, very hard work and this book was kind of a slap in the face in a way. I HATED the characters and the fact that they were so immature, nasty, and hateful to each other which happens a lot in many marriages. I guess I did walk away thinking about how easy it is to hurt the person you love the most. That's exactly what happened in this book...they are awful to each other! I think the message you can take away from this book is that marriage isn't for amateurs and it made my stomach churn because our society so readily accepts divorce which I think gives everyone a huge cop out. Don't get married if you aren't prepared to make sacrifices and be selfless!!
—Jenni
Leo Tolstoy famously opened up his novel Anna Karenina by stating, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Amateur Marriage can be read as Anne Tyler’s extensive commentary on this statement.This novel deals with life of an American family that spans over six decades. It begins in a Polish neighborhood of Baltimore with reverberations of the Pearl Harbor, triggering the marriage. Towards the end the narrative is informed of the attacks on the World Trade Center.One of the main themes of the novel is the significance of minor things in the general context of familial health and happiness. In this text the reader will find no villains and no saints, but characters in honest pursuit of their personal happiness. They are making various decisions at different stages of their lives, some of them consciously, and some—not. All of these decisions, however minute, influence their lives and contribute to the constantly changing overall picture. The limiting condition of existence is the impossibility to cancel and reprocess the decisions made, the redeeming one is the humane generosity of the text, cancelling the unequivocal attribution of actions as either good or bad, right or wrong.A very satisfying read, it wraps up a subtle and complex vision of the family life in a perfectly constructed, witty and easy-flowing text.
—Natalia
A lot of people who reviewed this book thought that it was about a marriage in which the partners were incompatible. They were too different. He was ethnic inner city, she was of WASP heritage. Their personalities were too different. They were both stuck in adolescence, hence the amateur quality of their marriage. But for me it was Every-marriage. Of course they were of different backgrounds, with World War II acting like a giant cultural mixer. Of course they were different--opposites attract. As to adolescence, that represented where they were mired, not a personality type. (Look at our society these days, look at Congress!)Both their personalities were problematical. She was totally temperamental, he was the cold fish. The more she pursued, the more he walled himself off. She became the trouble maker of the family, the proximal flashpoint. In comparison he looked good, wore the mantle of the victim. Yet his personality was such that as a young man in basic training he was a victim of "accidental" friendly fire by another man whom he more than annoyed.We know what Greek tragedy is. This is American tragedy. Neither partner could decide this wasn't an amateur marriage but the real thing. Neither could take a leap of faith. For neither did a door open and reveal the way where before there seemed to be only wall. Neither could give up that the other was maliciously withholding what he/she needed.He thought the answer was a woman with a cool personality. But at the end, when she was long gone, who was it he yearned to see when he rounded the bend?This book packed a punch. Of the Anne Tyler books I've read, it was the most powerful. I read it six years ago and have never forgotten it (although some of the details have faded in the meantime). You could get PTSD from reading this book.Why read it if it is so "traumatic?" So it can function like Greek tragedy and exorcise the demons. Cry it out via literature and perhaps not have to suffer it in real life.
—Jan Rice
