The Amateur Marriage: Summary and book reviews of The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler, plus links to an excerpt from The Amateur Marriage and a biography of Anne Tyler.
The Amateur Marriage
by Anne Tyler
Hardcover: Jan 2004,
320 pages.
Paperback: Oct 2004,
336 pages.
From the inimitable Anne Tyler, a rich and compelling novel about a mismatched marriage—and its consequences, spanning three generations.
They seemed like the perfect couple—young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother's grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.
Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable.
From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more fully into the complex entanglements of family life in this wise, embracing, and deeply perceptive novel.
The New Yorker
Although Tyler's prose occasionally slips into banality, she never falters in creating vivid characters whose weaknesses are both credible and compelling.
Miami Herald - Connie Ogle
She expertly explores the perils of marriage… Wise & observant…She has the uncanny ability to expose the most confusing contradictions of love.
Elle magazine - Kim Askew
In the fervor of WWII, Michael and Pauline rush head-long into marriage, then live in a constant state of turmoil …We watch safely from a distance like a busybody neighbor hiding behind the curtains, judgmental yet fascinated.
USA Today - Deirdre Donahue
In new novel The Amateur Marriage, Anne Tyler once again displays the qualities of wisdom, insightful writing and compassion that have made the Baltimore resident the most-admired serious yet popular writer working today. One is never embarrassed to be seen reading a Tyler novel.
New York Times Book Review (front cover) - William H. Pritchard
Tyler ranges over 60 years of American experience… from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the anniversary of that day in 2001…as she tracks one couple's domestic disturbances…[Her] writing is beautifully accurate, more often than not with a glinting vein of humor.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch - John Freeman
She evokes the entire sweep of [a marriage] with uncommon delicacy & dignity… gives us the feeling of being inside Michael and Pauline Anton's marriage.
Baltimore Sun - Martha Southgate
Her command of what will move a story forward & engross a reader is faultless.
Publishers Weekly
The range and power of this novel should not only please Tyler's immense readership but also awaken us to the collective excellency of her career.
Library Journal - Starr E. Smith
[This] sad story, as dark and ironic as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, is leavened by Tyler's trademark comic details, narrated with characteristic dry and witty understatement. This rewarding work is recommended for most public libraries.
Booklist - Donna Seaman
... the usually adept Tyler ends up setting 30 years of tedious marital unhappiness and domestic tragedy against a distressingly superficial and bland accounting of the rise of suburbia and the flowering of hippie culture. Her observations about how abruptly even the most boring life can go wrong, and about the fact that we are all amateurs in our first marriages, are poignant, however, and may be enough to satisfy readers who seek safe and comfy novels.
Kirkus Reviews
Painfully accurate and painfully funny as ever, [The Amateur Marriage] traces the stormy union of two people who love but can't stand each other......So smart, so sensitive, so readable and engaging. Is it churlish to suggest that an author obviously at the peak of her powers should broaden her horizons and push herself a little harder the next time out?
The Observer (UK) - Lisa Allardice
This 'wickedly good' author has come to represent the best of today's American literature… She is an exquisite chronicler of the everyday…Her characters are at once infuriating and endearing, conservative yet quietly eccentric.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
....an ode to the complexities of familial love, the centripetal and centrifugal forces that keep families together and send their members flying apart, the supremely ordinary pleasures and frustrations of middle-class American life.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by countrygirl
Anne Tyler just keeps getting better and better. The Amateur Marriage is a sometimes painful, sometimes sad, sometimes funny look into the marriage of Pauline and Michael Anton, a mismatched couple who endure a 30-year union. What I most like... Read More
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A vivid portrait of an
American family in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
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