Rating: 
Summary: A Sad, emotional rollercoaster
Review: Tyler delivers another literary tour-de-force about a "perfect" couple and their sad struggle through marriage.This book really hit home for me not because of the story, which many other writers would turn into a snoozer but because of Tyler's amazing ability to write. If this was a book about someone just walking a dog, she'd find a way to make it interesting. I'd really like this as a Oprah book.
Rating:
Summary: compulsively readable -- and a surprise on page 287
Review: Compulsively readable, especially for Tyler fans who love sinking into her predictable Baltimore milieu and old-fashioned phrasing like sinking into a hot bath after a freezing day. The biggest treat for me was running into Gina Meredith on page 287, Emily and Leon's little girl from "Morgan's Passing," all grown up now & married with a baby!! It was a pleasant thrill, like running into the grown daughter of old friends you haven't seen in 20 years. But I have to admit, no one in "Amateur Marriage" grabbed me the way Emily & Leon & Morgan & Bonnie & Brindle & even Mrs. Apple & Coquette etc etc from "Morgan's Passing," still seem like real people to me, 20 years later. Maybe Pauline...but the rest of the characters in this one are just not as vivid as I'd like. But Tyler at her second-best is still a great read.
Rating: 
Summary: A Sadly Conflicted Marriage
Review: There's nothing like the emotional high that people experience during the first days and weeks of meeting the one person that you think you will spend the rest of your life with. It is not an analytical time; differences lying just below the surface are not allowed to detract from the fortuitous moment. And so it was with Michael and Pauline just after Pearl Harbor in 1941. Pauline is rushed into the small grocery of Michael's family in inner-city Baltimore for emergency first aid. Michael, the epitome of calmness, practicality, and orderliness, is smitten by the vibrant, impetuous, and emotional Pauline. Her spur-of-the-moment influence immediately exerts subtle pressure on Michael to join the Army. But he was out of his element and was essentially a failure, receiving, perhaps luckily, an early discharge after a training accident. This episode was only a small harbinger of what was to come in their marriage. "The Amateur Marriage" is a truly insightful look at a marriage in perpetual conflict, where neither person really understands how to overcome their personality tendencies so that they can live in peace, hence an amateur marriage. Of course, the impact of the discord extends to the rest of the family, especially in the case of the oldest daughter Lindy. The author's account is not judgmental; however, it is clear that the volatility of Pauline has a more pronounced discordant impact than does Michael's somewhat plodding nature. The novel covers sixty years with the story picking up every so many years. Is there an intriguing plot? Not really. It is a journey of two people struggling with their incompatibilities and the effects on their extended family. The book is actually a larger study in the disconnects among people. It is not just Pauline and Michael that the author turns her attention to. There are any number of miscommunications explored. The author has a real talent for capturing deficient interactions. Personally, I did not find the book to be "simplistic" as a reviewer claims. To the contrary, there is a lot of wisdom in this book. In his later years, Michael does have the chance to be involved in a more harmonious relationship. The reader is left to ponder whether the new relationship fully erases the memories and pull of the past, despite the difficulties.
Rating:
Summary: Menwhile, back in Baltimore
Review: Beats me how Tyler keeps turning out such great novels; obviously, the well of her imagination is very deep. The Amateur Marriage is her 16th, and like its predecessors, it deals with one of society's outsiders: Pauline, who is too impulsive and querulous to fit into the tightly knit, Polish Catholic Baltimore community in which she find herself in love (and at war) with Michael. They marry, perhaps too quickly, and live upstairs from his cantankerous, embittered widow mother. Being good Catholics, they quickly saddle themselves with 3 children. Years pass, thirty of them, and we get painful, poignant, quirky, and humorous (all qualities at which Tyler excels in portraying with her writing skills) character development as these two misfits make each other progressively more and more miserable.
Not Tyler's best effort, but you know, I've read anything she's written and have never been really disappointed. This one gets a B.
Rating:
Summary: You Will Love It
Review: I am a big fan of this book. So if you are looking for a negative review, you can stop reading now. "The Amateur Marriage" is artistic and creative, one of the best books I have read in recent years. So if you enjoy well written, easily absorbed fiction like "The Five People You Meet in Heaven," "About a Boy," "Wicked," "The Curious Incident of Dog in Night-Time," "The Time Traveler's Wife," and "My Fractured Life," then you will love this book. At the beginning of World War II, Michael is a good boy in a Polish neighborhood working at his family's grocery store. One day in comes a banged and bruised Pauline. He jumps into hero mode and patches her up, saves the day, becomes her husband and so begins the Hell of a marriage neither one has any business being in. But like so things, this little Amateur Marriage survives...for a while. Like The War of the Roses, what makes the couple work is the love-hate, tug of war. They live off bitterness. But don't get the references to bitterness deter you. It is an excellent book and one that uses the bitterness as a source of entertainment. It is a fine book that I truly can't say enough about. Probably more in common with "My Fractured Life" and "About a Boy" then "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" and "The Time Traveler's Wife" in terms of tone, but in terms of enjoyment and writing quality it is on par with all of them. This is just a great book. I loved it.
Rating:
Summary: Tyler in top form
Review: Anne Tyler gets better and more insightful with each new book. In this one she dissects a marriage that begins during WWII and follows a modern route from inner city to suburbs, from newlywed to parental status. These characters are less quirky and unpredictable than the usual Tyler tribe, but the writer's eye and ear make them as fascinating as any in her past books. I once wrote to Tyler and thanked her for introducing me to people whom I would never get to know in life -- people who may be off-putting in the beginning but win your affection and attention.. That's true with this new novel and I am grateful all over again.
Rating:
Summary: Amateur Marriage - Professionaly written
Review: This was yet another wonderful novel written by the wonderful Anne Tyler. But what else would you grow to expect from such a wonderful author of her excellent caliber. Basically the 2 people involved are quite the mismach but they get married anyways. Its a marriage not quite made in heaven, but they are pros at dealing with this (no pun intended). Alot of interesting things continue to happen and the characters are developed quite well. Despite being a great novel, this novel also is almost a history text of american life thru out the last century. The only part I didn't like was that the child was named pagan. But what would you expect from a hippy.
Rating:
Summary: Her Best To Date
Review: I have read all of Anne Tyler's novels, and this one is the best she has written. In Amateur Marriage, Tyler revisits themes of time, memory and complicated relationships with the ones we love. She masterfully presents the viewpoints of various characters, creating a sort of tug of war within the reader as we silently cheer on first one character, and then another. Her perfect handling of the timeline kept me greedily turning pages to discover what had happened to certain characters over the course of the years. As soon as I read the last word, my first impulse was to immediately begin again to find clues and layers I might have missed on the first read. Definitely worth the time! I hope Ms. Tyler continues to delight her readers with such quality work as this.
Rating:
Summary: At the top of her form
Review: Anne Tyler has written one spirited, thought-provoking novel after the other for nearly thirty years. Rarely does she hit a false note, and rarely does she disappoint. "The Amateur Marriage" is the result of a novelist working at the top of her craft. Her gift for characterization is shown by the way readers' reactions to Michael and Pauline will change almost page by page. What brought these two together? Will they stay together? Can they? Should they? Tyler shifts her point-of-view so subtly throughout that we are given a 360-degree view of two people's lifetime together. "The Amateur Marriage" makes for compulsive reading. The end is haunting, and will stick in your mind for days.
Rating: 
Summary: A disappointment, as far as I'm concerned
Review: Of all Anne Tyler's novels, I'm afraid this one is the mustiest. Once again, she follows the relationship of two hopelessly mismatched people through years of marriage, as in "The Accidental Tourist," only the characters in the new novel aren't interesting or quirky, and the whole plot comes across as a long, hopeless tangle. I kept finding shadowy recycled characters from other Tyler novels on the pages of this story, as if the author had run out of fresh personalities to employ. By halfway through the book, I had decided I didn't really care any more whether Michael and Pauline found happiness together. If this had been the first Anne Tyler novel I'd ever read, I doubt if I'd pick up any more. It's too bad; with her gift for characterization and human drama, she could surely do better.
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