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Summary: A great story!
Review: This novel examines the many stages of marriage today in America and it makes for very entertaining reading. The family dynamic is subdued and very well-developed and I did enjoy the story for its attention to emotional detail!
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Summary: A book you can loose yourself in
Review: This is a simple story of a somewhat typical American marriage, set in Baltimore beginning at the end of WWII and continuing to the present day. Tyler is terrific at presenting the zeitgeist of the intervening decades and weaves an intriguing story that the reader will finish with a certain amount of regret, surprised that it ended so quickly.
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Summary: The Unlikely Pair
Review: It certainly brightens my day when I find out that my favorite author, Anne Tyler, has another book out. In "The Amateur Marriage" we have a couple who resemble the Morans of "Breathing Lessons". The high-energy, somewhat scatterbrained wife; the morose stick-in-the-mud husband have reappeared. But this time, there is an unexpected turn of events.... I don't want to give away plot turns, so I'll just say that there are many stages to a marriage, and this book examines them closely. This latest volume does not match Anne Tyler's best books -- to my mind these are the infinitely re-readable "Ladder of Years", "Breathing Lessons", "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" and "Saint Maybe". But it is still a great pleasure to read her prose and admire her deft creation of character, place and story.
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Summary: Another Touching Story
Review: Quite simply, one of the best books I have read in a while. Tyler never disapoints. Her poignant tale of a typical American marriage and family resonates long after the last chapter. I am glad that Tyler has such a big audience....proves that there are many people that enjoy and appreciate a finely written novel. Thank you, again, Ms. Tyler.
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Summary: In The First Marriage We Are All Amateurs
Review: Anne Tyler creates a rather stunning work of fiction in this book. She makes few sacrifices with her style for the sake of saleability. He story is crisp, poignant, and easily read. Her metaphors are quite excellent. And her descriptions of people and places give quite enough to let the reader feel he is there on the scene, or at least can imagine it vividly. Ms. Tyler portrays the hardships of marriage as well as the joys. And her main character gets to experience much of both, but it happens in two different marriages. The fact of the matter though is, that all people in their first marriage are amateurs. They either adapt and communicate with each other, or eventually, the pain gets too great to bear, and the marriage collapses. Interestingly, Tyler treats the death of one of her main characters as a little mysterious, but a seeming suicide. The reader gets this definite feeling of suicide As the last thing that we hear the character say is something about how everything is just fine and dandy. That is a big sign, when a person is severely depressed, that they have found the final solution. It truly does describe the vicissitudes of everyday married life, and what happens to different people as they move through the journey of life. This is truly a thought provoking book which all people would be enlightened by, married or not.
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Summary: Who Cares?
Review: I have always enjoyed the way that Anne Tyler develops characters. At first glance they appear offbeat, eccentric, and "different" but as they unfold before us we realize in them the humanity that connects with our own experience. You care about them as you understand who they are. At the halfway point in "The Amateur Marriage", I realized that I just did not want to spend any more time with these boring and disagreeable people. I can understand Ms. Tyler's desire to do something different and I don't need a "happy" story, but these monotone characters have none of the richness and depth that I expect from her writing.
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Summary: Very Sad, Very Powerful
Review: Anne Tyler always has a way of taking the most mundane, ordinary lives and making them important and real...much like real people view their own lives and families. Here is the story of the most ordinary and cliche'd of marriages, that of Michael and Pauline Anton. They meet and marry in the prewar haste of 1941--when Pearl Harbor galvanized ordinary young men into rushing off to enlist, and ordinary young women into marrying them in haste. Cocooned in his Polish Baltimore neighborhood, the only surviving son of a grocery-store proprietor (his mother), Michael Anton is completely naive to the ways of the world--until he meets vivacious, pretty young Pauline, so daring that she wears a bright red coat! She comes from the next neighborhood, and that makes her exotic to Michael, who courts and marries her before ever stopping to see who she is. What follows is an almost 60-year saga of this terribly mismatched couple--their children, their neighbors, their lives. What makes it interesting? The fact that Michael and Pauline and everyone in their circle could be us--the fact that while while we may think our own lives and doings are unique and important, they are only so to us. We see Michael and Pauline through the eyes of each of their children, through the changing decades of postwar America, through tragedy and pain and death--and the end? As simple as the beginning. And that is Tyler's gift. Showing us that in the end, we are all alike, no matter how we choose to dress it up, no matter what our choices. In the end, we are simple human beings who live the best we can in a life that may or may not bring us happiness. This is one of Tyler's best books, as good as she has ever been, and I highly recommend it.
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Summary: One of Anne Tyler's Best Novels to Date
Review: Anne Tyler's newest novel, THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE, is one of her best. She is known for her "typically American" tales that focus on the paradoxes in the lives of everyday people, who struggle with love, relationships, family, order and disorder. She rents the fabric most families hide behind as they try to mask the holes that threaten to tear apart the material that strains to keep them together. For over forty years readers have come to expect Tyler's canvas to be illuminated by epiphanies, eccentricities, psychological insights, memorable characters and an imagination that allows for a kind of playfulness despite the rockslides. THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE begins in 1941, just after the attack at Pearl Harbor. Pauline swooped into the Anton family grocery store with a cut on her head. As soon as Michael Anton saw her he was swept off his feet, almost as though he had been waiting for her. After he applies first aid to her wound, she invites him to join her and her friends, all of whom are going to cheer the neighborhood boys who are signing up to fight the "Japs." As if in a dream, Michael grabs his ill-fitting jacket and follows this engaging girl out of the shop. They join the crowd that is caught up in the excitement of a parade in honor of the boys who are enlisting to fight a war in far off places. Pauline asks Michael if he will be going with these boys, to which he responded, "Well ' naturally I will be!" As such things can happen, without a single thought to his duties, to his mother, to his life or to the ramifications of his actions, as if on a lark, Michael enlists. Before Michael knows it, he is off to fight the war. Unfortunately he returns home wounded; he must use a cane and walks with a limp that will stay with him for the rest of his life. While he was away, his fiancé, Pauline, started having doubts about him. After all, they barely know each other and they are still very young. But Michael is starry-eyed and absolutely committed to their forthcoming marriage. Nothing, or nobody, can persuade him that they should not marry --- not even Pauline, who tells him that she has changed her mind. With his tunnel vision and narrowly focused idealism, he is not to be deterred. The marriage takes place as planned. After a short honeymoon they return to Baltimore and move into the tiny apartment above the grocery store with Michael's aging mother. "Pauline believed that marriage was an interweaving of souls, while Michael viewed it as two people traveling side by side but separately." Two such different worldviews lead to arguments and Michael asks himself one day if it's "possible to dislike one's own wife." In the beginning the couple works hard to remain above their smoldering resentments. Pauline becomes pregnant, gives birth to Lindy, quickly gets pregnant again and Karen enters their crowded lives. Too soon after their second baby makes her entrance into the world, George is conceived and takes his place in the already burgeoning family. By this time the walls of the tiny apartment don't seem able to contain the people or emotions that are fulminating toward a volcanic eruption as the days pass, oh so slowly. After years of nagging, Pauline convinces Michael that they have to move from above the grocery store to a place where everyone has some space. Thus, they schlep old Mrs. Anton, the three children and themselves, en masse, out to the suburbs. "The entrance to Elmview Acres was a double wrought-iron gate" that opened onto a small community of "ticky-tacky" ranch homes set on green lots. The atmosphere was one of peaceful safety in a structured and organized manner. Many such communities bloomed across the landscape in post World War II America in order to accommodate the soldiers who had returned from the war, married their sweethearts and needed to buy into the "dream." As the novel further unfolds, Tyler fractures time and narrative. She gives us both Michael's and Pauline's side of the story. Decades pass. They fight, their children grow up, Mrs. Anton is a steady presence among them and all seems to be as it should --- until 1960, when their world is forever shattered. Lindy, who had always been a self-contained child, disappears without a trace. The sixties were heating up with issues that flowed through the cracks in society and spread like hot lava over the lives of every American household. The world was exploding. The Vietnam War was the catalyst for war protestors, activists were marching for women's and civil rights, the sexual revolution was born with the "Pill" and the drug culture emerged. The void that Lindy's disappearance creates in the Anton family slowly heals but remains a painful scar. They all move on with their lives. Karen and George move quietly into the background of their parents' lives, leaving the reader with Pauline and Michael. This mismatched couple, who grows apart each day but whose roots are so entangled they cannot breathe, merely remain in a state of stasis. Then, on that fateful evening when they are "celebrating" their thirty years together, they begin to reminisce about their wedding night. And Pauline, ever the "cock-eyed optimist" who sees the world through rose-colored glasses, tries to rewrite their history: "So what if we fight a bit? I just think that proves we have a very spirited marriage!" At long last, Michael finally lets loose: " 'It has not been fun ' it's been hell. All this shouting and weeping and carrying on,' he said. Stalking off, slamming doors, kicking furniture, throwing my clothes out the window, locking me out of the house.' " Pauline insists that Michael leave the house for good if he is as miserable as he claims to be. He does. And, after three decades together, their marriage is suddenly over. The old cliché that "time heals all wounds" lurks beneath the surface of THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE, but Tyler doesn't really dig down to it in any obvious ways. Rather, as in real life, her fictional world continues to turn, and one at a time each character moves on with his/her wounds, bound at some time to heal. As in all of her works, Tyler has woven truisms and object lessons that will make readers nod knowingly. Tyler's "people" are so familiar that readers will think, "Of course I know people like 'them' don't we all?" Despite being highly idiosyncratic, the things that set them apart actually make them more accessible. Human nature is what fascinates Anne Tyler and she plays with it as if it were modeling clay. In her hands she fashions people, places, events, atmospheres, pain and joy with a smooth narrative style that is punctuated with life lessons for anyone who chooses to see them. Fans of Tyler will not be disappointed in THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE, and those new to her work will be motivated to explore her other novels. Her many talents continue to blossom with age, and her touch remains as gentle as it is firm. --- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum
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Summary: I really wish I liked this novel...
Review: I was eagerly awaiting the publication of Tyler's new novel and I was thrilled to get it right away at the library. More than half way through the book, I realized I really did not care about the characters or what happened to them. I am now at the age where I can stop reading a book I don't like, even if I have a lot time invested in it, so that's what I did. Tyler is a truly amazing writer, and though I haven't read every one of her novels, I have read many of them. I loved Saint Maybe, A Patchwork Planet, The Accidental Tourist, and Ladder of Years. If you want to read a brilliant novel about a long time marriage and quirky people you will care about, please read Tyler's novel "Breathing Lessons" and skip this one.
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Summary: A "Marriage" not made in heaven
Review: Anne Tyler's "Amateur Marriage" seems rather amateurish itself. It's basically about marital bickering that lasts a lifetime, between two people who were never willing to work on what they had. Tyler has plenty of promise here, but it's bogged down by lackluster writing and a very by-the-numbers plot. Michael Anton was a reserved Polish boy, who fell for the beautiful Pauline Barclay when he first met her in the early 1940s. She was suffering a minor injury from a patriotic demonstration, and he bandaged her wound. After the war is over, they marry, but they don't quite settle into suburban bliss. Why? Well, contrary to appearances, they are not suited to one another. He is controlled, reserved and cold. She is ebullient and outgoing. And while some couples can make "opposites attract," Michael and Pauline simply drive each other nuts. They have three children, cling to their ever-dying marriage over the years, until a family crisis involving their young daughter causes a permanent problem for these long-suffering "amateurs." Pauline and Michael, if they were real, would be ideal examples of why you should get to know your fiancee before you get married. In fact, forget that: don't even get engaged before knowing the person! "Amateur Marriage" succeeds in being a sobering, rather depressing look at a marriage that should never have taken place. The biggest problem with this book is that it seems like Tyler wrote it on autopilot. The marriage's disintegration is pretty tedious to watch, and there's no feeling that it's building up to some sort of climax. When the book ends, it's not a relief or a shock -- just sort of "oh, that's it." The fast-forwarding through the years of their marriage also makes it hard to get a handle on how things are going for them. Even the description of the cultural shifts of the sixties and seventies are, simply put, rather dull. Her writing is quite nice, but it fails to cover up the plodding plot. It's also rather hard to really connect with the characters. Through the first third of the book, it seems like Pauline and Michael have plenty of promise. They're both closed off to one another, unwilling to heal the rifts, and thus perfectly suited to this novel. But unfortunately, they also get on the reader's nerves with their ceaseless bickering and superficiality. The spark is missing in "Amateur Marriage." Die hard fans of Tyler may run to read it, but it's unlikely to draw any new fans in with its plodding, poorly-utilized plot.
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