DRAGON: Anne Tyler / Grieving Lessons

Friday, March 27, 2020

Anne Tyler / Grieving Lessons

Credit...Illustration by Tina Berning

Grieving Lessons

by Julia Grass
May 4, 2012

Over five decades of exuberant shape-shifting across the fictional landscape, Anne Tyler has cut the steady swath of a literary stalwart, writing novel after novel whose most memorable characters inhabit a cosmos all their own, a contemporary meta-Baltimore populated by ordinary if idiosyncratic citizens, middle-class homebodies cocooned yet smothered by their families. What makes each story distinctive is the particular way its characters rebel against hereditary confines, cope with fateful crises or forge relationships with new acquaintances who rock their world.

Tyler must have fans who can peg a life’s joys and trials to her books: backpacked through Greece with “A Slipping-Down Life,” honeymooned with “Celestial Navigation,” juggled “The Accidental Tourist” with nursing infant, maintained sanity with “Breathing Lessons” while negotiating cutthroat divorce, lost self in “Ladder of Years” during chemo infusions, was downloading “Noah’s Compass” when phone rang with news of first grandchild. My introduction to Tyler was, as for so many readers, “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.” I opened it on a People Express flight from Newark to Burlington, Vt., in 1983. Somewhere over New England, I fell in love. I was captivated, charmed and moved. How captivated readers will be by Tyler’s 19th novel, “The Beginner’s Goodbye,” may depend in part on how receptive they are to ghosts — more precisely, to the notion that a loved one can loiter with us beyond death because of “unfinished business.”

“The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how other people reacted,” Aaron Woolcott observes, embarking on his story. Although he’s rational bordering on cranky, Aaron takes for granted that the posthumous Dorothy is no mere phantom, symptomatic of the “magical thinking” that engulfs someone after the abrupt loss of a beloved spouse. “Gimpy, geeky Aaron,” as he refers to himself, is hemiplegic, having lost full use of his right limbs after a childhood virus. He walks with the help of a brace and a cane. He suffers as well the occasional bout of stammering and the legacy of his mother’s guilt. It makes sense that he married the first suitable candidate — but that he did so at age 24 is surprising. He sounds more like a man who, hardened through years of solitude, is constitutionally resistant to fun.

Once again, Tyler exhibits her genius for the incisive, savory portrayal of marriage, of the countless perverse ways in which two individuals sustain a shared existence. Temperamentally, Aaron and Dorothy were a match too good to be true: both competitively smart, pragmatic and aloof — averse to mutual pampering, interior decorating and anything remotely sentimental. In hindsight, through Aaron’s eyes, they’re a pair of I’ll-do-it-my-way types who might have been delighted and grateful to have found each other if they weren’t so busy following the same routines they did when they were single. Before Dorothy’s death, on a hot summer day in 2007, they had been “happily, unremarkably married” for 11 years, apparently content without children.

To outsiders, however, their union was a misfit. To begin with, Dorothy was eight years older and 15 inches shorter than Aaron. “When Dorothy and I hugged, all the wrong parts of us met. . . . If you saw us walking down the street together, my sister said, you would take us for a father and child heading off to grammar school.” Aaron’s sister also pronounced Dorothy “a woman with the social skills of a panda bear” — which Aaron doesn’t deny. In repeatedly unflattering descriptions, he seems proud that she is oblivious to fashion, as if this ensures that he alone can see her true attractions. “Her clothes made her figure seem squat — wide, straight trousers and man-tailored shirts, chunky crepe-soled shoes of a type that waitresses favored in diners. Only I noticed the creases as fine as silk threads that encircled her wrists and her neck. Only I knew her dear, pudgy feet, with the nails like tiny seashells.”

Dorothy Rosales was a radiation oncologist whose estrangement from her Mexican-American family didn’t bother Aaron. Which is telling, since Aaron has resigned himself to working as an editor at the publishing house founded by his great-grandfather. His boss is his older sister, Nandina, who lives alone in the north Baltimore house where the two siblings grew up. Woolcott Publishing is the sort of vanity press that fulfills the dreams of aging veterans, each certain that his version of “My War” is the book the world’s been waiting for. Yet its claim to fame — and solvency — is its Beginner’s series: “The Beginner’s Wine Guide,” “The Beginner’s Monthly Budget,” “The Beginner’s Book of Dog Training.” Aaron met Dorothy while researching “The Beginner’s Cancer.”

The novel’s second chapter opens as bluntly as the first: “Here is how she died.” The most suspenseful, heartbreaking and farcical passage in the book, it puts on panoramic display Tyler’s knack for comic pacing, her insight into the quotidian habits that engender marital friction and her eye for the absurdities that intrude on personal tragedy. Aaron is at home nursing a cold; Dorothy returns early from work. Each having expected solitude, they fall to bickering — about a missing box of Triscuits — then separate in a huff. From the bedroom, Aaron hears an alarming cascade of noises.

He opens the door to find himself “on the edge of a forest. The hall was a mass of twigs and leaves and bits of bark. Even the air was filled with bark — dry bark chips floating in a dusty haze, and a small bird or a very large insect suddenly whizzing up out of nowhere. Isolated pings! and ticks! and pops! rang out as different objects settled — a pane of glass falling from a window, something wooden landing on the wooden floor. . . . All I knew was that this forest was thicker in the living room, and that Dorothy was beyond that, in the sun porch, where I could see nothing but leaves, leaves, leaves, and branches as thick as my torso.”

Stunned, Aaron navigates the next several minutes in a state of attenuated confusion. Once help arrives, he points a firefighter toward the sun porch — or the place where it ought to be. “The fireman said, ‘Oh, man.’ ” How concisely that emphasis evokes the inevitable. Though doctors do their best to save Dorothy, Aaron finds himself at a place he invokes later when, talking with a friend who is planning a marriage proposal, he reflects, “No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one’s ring from a nurse or an undertaker.”

For weeks, Aaron lives obstinately in his half-demolished house, a tarpaulin covering its fractured roof. When rain bypasses the tarp and shorts out the wiring, he moves in with Nandina, sleeping in his boyhood bedroom. Now he will do anything to avoid setting foot in his own home. He hires the first contractor who offers his services — and gives the guy a key. Needless to say, the contractor, a stolid recovering alcoholic, will renovate more than Aaron’s house.

The most entertaining parts of the novel are the scenes depicting the office family at Woolcott: matronly, cheerful Nandina; Charles, the marketing wiz and droll patriarch; Irene, the elegant designer on whom Aaron had a longtime crush; and Peggy, a crinoline-wearing feminist flower-child who spikes her chocolate chip cookies with soy grits. Along with Aaron, they form a kinder, gentler version of Tom Rachman’s doomed newspaper crew in “The Imperfectionists.” In one of the funniest scenes, Peggy proposes adding “The Beginner’s Menopausal Wife” to their signature series.

Yet Woolcott’s quotidian joie de vivre also reveals how oddly disconnected these characters are from the larger culture. There’s no anxiety about life under the late reign of Bush (or the early reign of Bezos), and except for passing mention of an Apple Store, there’s little evidence of the technological innovations that radically changed the texture of daily American life well before 2007. Surely Charles would be proposing titles like “The Beginner’s Facebook” and “The Beginner’s Smartphone.”

Perhaps I quibble. One of the pleasures in reading fiction is the occasional chance it offers to visit a just world: small publishers thrive, the dead return to set us straight, the bereaved find love once more, and houses crushed by trees are restored without a single insurance glitch, bloated invoice, missed deadline or badly finished floor.

Even in fairy tales, however, the hero must slay a dragon, enslave himself to a cruel sorcerer, walk barefoot and blind across a wasteland of thorns to win the beloved. The more vivid his suffering, the happier his ending. Call me heartless, but I found Aaron’s suffering too muted to make his resurrection cathartic or even credible. Roll your eyes at the textbook “grief cycle,” but it’s simply true that anyone mourning the loss of a partner must endure a frightening spectrum of emotions before arriving at a new equilibrium. Aaron proceeds from shock to an extended state of avoidance; until the very end, Dorothy’s ghost only mirrors his inertia. His own disclosure that he was prone to violent rages as a child makes it hard to believe that he never collapses in tearful hysterics, gets wantonly drunk at an office party or throws a few of those condolence casseroles back in his neighbors’ faces. Even if I did believe in ghosts, I’d still find his new lease on life too easy and too convenient.

I admire Tyler’s loyalty and benevolence toward her characters, but in “The Beginner’s Goodbye” her lovingly constructed cosmos is in danger of becoming a snow globe: a hermetically sealed community in which the greatest peril is being caught in an artificial blizzard.