Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing after reading her more recent work
Review: After being totally delighted by "Back When We Were Grownups" and "A Patchwork Planet", I eagerly ordered "Breathing Lessons" expecting it to be even better since it won the Pulitzer prize. I loved the first two books because the characters were so wonderfully human. By no means perfect, they managed to be lovable despite their flaws. Their daydreams and moods and perceptions were very recognizable to me. I also thought that the situations they found themselves in, though perhaps a bit on the quirky side, were quite realistic. I found the characters in "Breathing Lessons" annoying and unappealing for the most part and the plotline farfetched. I don't know how two people who got along as poorly as Maggie and Ira could possibly stay married for 28 years. They belong in "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" more than in a novel by Anne Tyler. Their lives come off as dreary, depressing and pointless. I kind of liked Maggie but I found myself wondering about her contact with reality. I thought Ira was meanspirited and moody for the most part, and his treatment of his son Jesse was horrifying. I think Maggie and Ira are lucky Jesse is only an unmotivated slacker and not a mass murderer considering the emotional and verbal abuse Ira dishes out to him. My other complaint about this book is that none of the action really rang true. I mean how many people manage to crash their car twice in one day by mistaking the gas peddle for the brake and not have their driver's license revoked? Why is Maggie estranged from Fiona and Leroy in the first place? How many people would be willing or able to perform at a funeral without any prior notice or practice? Just to mention three of the many unlikely situations in this book. I'm glad that "Breathing Lessons" was not my first experience with Anne Tyler because I'm afraid it would also have been my last.
Rating: 
Summary: Optimistic message
Review: Tyler paints the picture of a succesful and happy Marriage of two upper-middle-aged people. The point is that this is a happy Marriage of two completely different personalities, both of whom are very human, and nowhere near perfect. Snip: (...)
Rating: 
Summary: Did this really win a pulitzer?
Review: It is incredible to think that this awful book was awarded a Pulitzer prize. If anything, it should have been awarded a prize for having the most annoying and irritating main character inflicting the pages of a modern novel. Maggie is the kind of person who meddles, interferes, and sometimes helps destroy people's lives, as was evident in her interference between Fiona and Jesse. She reminds me I've people I've known and avoid like the plague. Were we supposed to feel sympathy for her? And we never really understand why she gave up a chance to go to college and make something of herself--instead, she chooses to work as an aid in a nursing home. Nothing wrong with that, but since she had the opportunity, she could have advanced herself into a career where she could provided a greater service to that population. This kind of book, filled with depressing people, unfulfilled lives, and an ending which leaves you even more depressed--that we can read about in the newspaper. In books, there should at least be some sort of message, a lesson, something that gives us food for thought, a resolution.
Rating: 
Summary: Irritating on many, many levels.
Review: If I'd realized in advance that this book had won the Pulitzer Prize, I might have been spared the angst of reading it, since I'm convinced that the people who get to define "literature" in this world are depressed, middle-aged white men. I avoid literature every chance I get. Anyway... I'm not a teenager; I'm about the age of Maggie in this book, and if I could have reached through the speakers of my car to get hold of her throat, I would have killed both her and Ira. And I'd like to do the same to Anne Tyler for subjecting me to this. Generally I read a few pages or a couple chapters of a book, and I can tell whether I'm going to like it or not. Then I either get rid of it or finish reading it. This book had enough truly hilarious stuff that I kept on reading, hoping that SOMEBODY would get a clue before the end. But the book dribbled to an end and I was left asking myself, "I wasted 8 hours of my life on THIS?" If my husband had said the things to our son that Ira says to their son in front of his own child, he'd have been in a divorce court so fast his head would have spun. But Maggie says, "I'll never forgive you." And ten minutes later she's got her head on his shoulder and all is forgiven. The people in this book sometimes seemed very real, but whenever it got to crisis time, they behaved in a way that no one I know would behave. A way that ensured that nothing got solved so that the book could struggle onward a little longer. I'm sorry, but I believe that the only people who will like this book are those who like unhappy endings and believe that to be realistic and "literature" a book has to have an unhappy, unresolved ending (i.e. depressed, middle-aged white professors of English literature).
Rating: 
Summary: The EXTRA-Ordinary Maggie
Review: Let me tell you why I liked this book. It gave me a different perspective. Although many people (both readers and characters in the book) have criticised her for being one-dimensional I found her to be quite extraordinary. Her sensitivity and sense of place within her family is touching. The reason why her image radiates ordinariness is because everyone has labelled her that way. I found this to be true in the way that people often create labels for others and then the label is accepted as some kind of truth. Maggie may not be a likeable person or even a realistic person you can picture in your life, but certainly everyone can empathise with the tendency people have to suffocate other people with images they have created for them. I don't think Maggie is that simple. If she were than she could never imagine a life outside of her own. But, when she and Ira get in a fight in the car and she demands to be let out she imagines a completely different life for herself. This is the imaginary flight that is carried out in actuality in Ladder of Years. You could say that this is the off-handed daydream of a flat character because it is just as immediately forgotten as it is conjured. However, I think this suggests a more complex state of mind. One which can envision other states of being but consciously rejects them. Incidentally this is a very ordinary trait, one that I imagine many people can sympathise with. In some ways she is more ordinary than most people because she is always actively trying to normalise other people. She is not only suppressed by other people's images of her, but she is trying to mould everyone into the image she wants them to be. Her intentions are always positive. She wants them to be better people and fulfil their potential, but at the same time she is stifling their sense of individual identity by imaging them to inhabit an image that isn't realistic. This is a common difficulty with people who are "well-wishers". A major reason for why I appreciated this novel so much is because of its comic perspective. While dealing with the difficult relations between people, especially family, it is able to not take itself too seriously. There are incredibly comic moments such as the car accident and when Maggie and Ira are caught making out in the friend's bedroom. Anne Tyler is able to balance the serious and the comic while making shrewd observations about human nature. She shows us we all have the ability to be just like everyone else and wholly our own person at the same time.
Rating:
Summary: I like Anne Tyler, but..
Review: Several years ago I attempted to read Breathing Lessons but just gave it up because the characters were just too one-dimensional, boring, and unbelievable. After recently reading several other of Tyler's books (Ladder of Years, Patchwork Planet, Homesick Restaurant) and really enjoying them, I decided to try again. Sorry, but this book is a stinker! How it won a Pulitzer is beyond me. Unlike her other books, this one has no real hook for the reader, that is, nothing to keep him turning the pages. I finally (again) became so disgusted with the main characters that I (again) gave up. If you want to start reading Anne Tyler, don't start on this one because you may never read another. Perhaps this book was written as an example of a certain kind of writing for some esoteric literature class, but not for the general reader.
Rating:
Summary: Ordinary People in Ordinary Situations
Review: Ordinary people in ordinary situations. Don't people get enough of that already? God knows I do. I read novels in the hope that the author has been moved to peer beneath the surface aspects of life and in doing so has discovered some powerful truth or emotion that he (or she) was compelled to express in the form of the book that I'm now holding. Well, no such luck here. I guess I should mention that more literate people than I saw fit to award this book a Pulitzer Prize. Go figure. It makes me think I may be overlooking some positive quality but I can't find it. To me, it's just flat and dull...
Rating:
Summary: A Boring Novel That Won The Pulitzer Prize
Review: The fact that this book won the Pulitzer Prize tells more about the Pulitzer Prize than anything: The prize must be awarded to authors who tell incredibly boring stories, with incredibly boring characters, with no plot, no emotion, no humanity, no prose, no dialogue, and no imagination. I only shed tears at the thought of having been duped to read this. I love Nicholas Sparks, I love Kazuo Ishiguro, I love Willa Cather, I love Flannery O'Connor, and I love Tom Clancy. What do these authors have? STORY-TELLING ABILITY. To be completely honest, "Breathing Lessons" was one of the slowest reads of any book I've ever read. For some reason, the author thinks this story about medicocrity would warm the hearts of mediocre people. If this is the case, then I applaud her. I will never read another work from this author. EVER. I truly wasted my time with this inferior work and I'm very angry that 'political correctness' (i.e., 'we haven't had a mediocre story win the Pulitzer Prize' yet) would win over an enthralling, emotional story like 'The Notebook' or 'Snow Falling On Cedars' or 'Cold Mountain'.
Rating:
Summary: Simple Story
Review: Breathing Lessons is a simple story of life. It is not the controversial, limit-pushing MTV excitement, but a real look at marriage and parenthood without sex, vulgar language or murder. Maggie is a typical mom--overlooked, under-appreciated, almost abused. Some people might call her a "meddling mother" but she spends her life showing how much she loves her husband, Ira, and her children. She just wants to help others--constantly. Seeing Maggie in this way makes you stop and think, even if only for a moment, that you should thank your mom for all she has done for you. Remove yourself from the hustle of 2000. Allow yourself to fall into this story and appreciate a simple time when families stuck together marriages survived. Now THAT is a lesson!
Rating:
Summary: Hard to get past annoying main character
Review: Maggie goes to a funeral of her best friends husband andentangles herself in nearly everyone's life. Maggie is a meddler notabove twisting the truth to bend life to her vision of it. In the endthe tangled web annoys and angers nearly everyone around her and isjust painful to read. I'm familiar with the "if it's painful andyou hate the characters it must be good literature" school ofthought and maybe it is, the pulitzer people thought it was. But formy money and time I'd skip it
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