Ladder of Years

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Summary: Understanding life¿s nuances can require a journey
Review: Anne Tyler loves to take typical social situations, in particular marriage, and peel back the superficial layers and observe her characters as they face the imperfections and unsettling aspects of their lives. "Ladder of Years" is no exception.

Delia Grinstead had never left home, marrying a doctor who her father had brought into a home-based practice at age seventeen. Now at age forty her life suffered from terminal blandness. Her teen-aged children ignored her, even treating her with disdain, and her husband, an unaffectionate sort, took her for granted. A chance encounter with a younger man in a supermarket sparked a self-assessment that led to Delia simply walking away from her family on an annual outing to the beach with nothing more than a bathing suit, a robe, and a few hundred dollars.

Hitching a ride to a remote town in her home state, Delia begins to slowly eke out a new existence. The quiet resolve and good nature of Delia is a constant. Her whereabouts are discovered soon after her disappearance, which forces her to reflect on her former existence as she is contacted in one manner or another by several of her family members. Interestingly, Delia becomes more than a little attached to a new family as a housekeeper/nanny to an educator and his twelve-year-old son.

A return home for her daughter's wedding unexpectedly presents Delia with decisions concerning her new and previous lives. Readers looking for a dramatic transformation in either Delia or her social situation could be disappointed. However, it is evident that Delia has learned from her journey and decides to move on accordingly.

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Summary: Impostor complex
Review: Anne Tyler writes that years of dealing with teenagers had turned Delia Grinstead into a pacifist. She has an adventure at the grocery store impersonating the girlfriend of a jilted husband, but no one in her family of two college students, high school age son, Carroll, and doctor husband, Sam, is in a frame of mind to hear about it. Her father, also a doctor, had lived with them, (they, in fact, lived in his house), but was now deceased. Delia's sister Linda had been married to a French literature professor.

The family is to go on their annual trip to the Delaware shore. Delia's sister Eliza is unmarried. Delia has started to visit Adrian, the man she met in the supermarket. He is a producer of a newsletter. Tyler describes Delia's mother-in-law as a guest who feels it her duty to point out the damning flaws in the household. Her presence makes Delia feel inadequate. Before going to the shore they always have Sam's mother over for dinner to make up for not taking her with them.

Since the death of Delia's father Sam has been redoing the house and yard. An old lady arrives at dinnertime to tell Delia to leave Adrian alone. The garbled statements of the woman save Delia. She decides that Adrian is shallow, anyway. They have to take the cat to the beach with them because workmen are sanding the floors at their house in Baltimore.

Delia considers to herself that Sam gets her all riled up, (they had exchanged words, questions about Adrian and the old woman's message), and then, in lofty fashion, removes himself. After that sort of quarrel with Sam, Delia walks down the beach by herself, and returning to the cottage she persuades a repairman to give her a ride in the RV he has borrowed from his brother. He lets her out at an inland town per her request. She has only Sam's beach robe, her bathing suit and beach shoes on.

She goes to a dime store and purchases underwear and to a dress shop where she buys a dress. She sees a place advertising rooms for rent and stops there and arranges for weekly accomodations. She finds a job working for the local lawyer. Three or so days later she reads in the newspaper that she has disappeared. No one seems to know the color of her hair or her eyes when her family evidently makes a report to the police.

At the end of the week her sister Eliza shows up in the park where she is eating her lunch. The repairman had contacted the family following the story in the newspaper. Eliza says that Sam is roaming the house like a zombie. Delia's children do not know what to think. Delia expects Sam to show up in Bay Borough, but he writes a letter saying he will not invade her privacy. She has always felt redundant, that her sisters or her husband can handle any of her tasks, that she, Delia, is merely playing house.

A private detective brings Delia a stray cat. Her landlady tells her to keep the cat. After becoming annoyed with her lawyer-employer, as in the case of her husband the charge is bossiness, Delia goes to an interview for a job as a live-in sitter and companion. She spends Christmas on her own while the boy goes to see his mother and her employer visits friends. She thinks of her family in Baltimore eating goose.

They visit the boy Noah's grandfather at a place called Senior City. The grandfather, Nat, explains that the people there are organized in a vertical pattern with the most disabled on the top floor. Delia starts to bring the kinds of pickly foods to Nat that her father liked. In Bay Borough Delia runs into her son Carroll who claims that Eliza is making a play for Sam. Nat is to be evicted because his new wife is expecting a baby. The next summer Delia goes to Ocean City for a week's vacation. Delia returns to Baltimore for her daughter's wedding. The daughter gets the jitters and doesn't get married, at least initially. Delia decides the past year and a half has been a time trip. The book is wonderfully sensitive and wonderfully funny.

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Summary: Too Real to Be True
Review: Delia defies all that her family thinks they understand about her. Her husband and kids are at an age where they take her for granted. Her sisters seem to regard her entire life as the "baby" of the family to have been picture perfect. They almost regard her as part of the scenery, but not a real woman. One can only take this sort of treatment for so long without doing something drastic.

And she does. She walks away from all of them and surprises herself by creating a new life. She tries to live simply, not just because of small salary, but out of a desire to keep her new life uncomplicated.

She finds, however, that even a simple life has it's requirements and compromises. In the beginning, she tries to keep her belongings down to one small box, but has to make a daily shopping trip to find things she needs. She tries to be professional or remote in her relationships only to be drawn in to friendships and an extended family of sorts anyway.

Some of the reviews here seem to find the the ending disappointing. I thought it was unexpected, but only if you're used to needless melodrama. No superhero blasting the scenery to bits and scooping the heroine off for another adventure will be found here. Only love and the people and motives that shape our emotions and actions is revealed. I found this book and Delia to be sincerly human.

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Summary: Delia's Gone
Review: Delia Grimstead met a man at the store. She had a little flirtation. His wife came by her house and accused her of having an affair in front of her family. Not true, of course, but her husband, sisters and children hardly seemed to notice, hardly seemed to care. Then one day, while she and her family are staying at the beach in Maryland, she walks away with nothing but her husbands robe over her bathing suit and the five hundreds dollars of vacation money.

She catches a ride to the nearby town of Bayborough, where she gets a room in a boarding house and a job working as a secretary for an attorney. This is all new to Delia, as she was raised a doctor's daughter who married her father's partner. She had never known another home other than the one she'd grown up in. Now for the first time in her life, she has only herself to rely on. After awhile she begins to make friends and, slowly but surely, she impacts the lives of those she's around. She has become self-reliant, then she takes a job with a divorced man, living in his house, helping to raise his child and it seems that now she's doing just what she'd done when she'd walked away from her old life. In fact those in her new life fear she may walk out of theirs. And after a year away, she learns her daughter is getting married and she has to go back and face those she'd left so abruptly.

This is a story about someone who had to run away to learn to appreciate what she'd left behind and it's peopled with Anne Tyler's usual cast of real life characters, who will stay with you long after you finish the book. In fact, it's been a few weeks and I'm still thinking about them. It's just amazing how Ms. Tyler makes you a part of her character's lives, how she get you to thinking about them at the oddest times.

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Summary: Ladder leaves the reader wanting more
Review: Having read Ann Tyler's "Ladder of Years" twice within the past year, I can honestly say I am no more appreciative of the book than I was in '02.

Most reviews seem to consider the book a tragedy, while others call it inspirational - a few reviewers even commented that THEY would like to pull a "Delia" and escape their present lives. I consider this work a dissapointment. While Tyler's writing is beautiful and she has masterful use of elements such as character, theme and symbol (I enjoyed the cat references) - the plot of the book (or lack thereof) left me frustrated and empty.

Tyler sets up several possible areas for Delia to grow - from her brief and PG-rated fling with Adrian to her migration to Bay Borough - and none of them flesh out. Delia leaves her family - Sam, her distant and often unaffectionate husband and her three teenage-angst ridden children - only to fall back into the same behaviors again. She goes to work for Mr. Pomfret who treats her like Sam but with a paycheck, and then she goes on to Joel and becomes a pseudo-wife to him and mother to Noah. And, much like she did to her real family, Delia runs away from them too when the pressures get to be too great. Delia's act was one of desperation - a cry to break the boring and unappreciated rigors of her daily life. But Delia never makes good on her adventure...she ends up back home again without having accomplished anything.

I wish Tyler would have delivered on ONE single, solitary situation that she so graciously tempts the reader with. I felt for Delia, I really did, but my sympathy extends only as far as Delia is willing to go...and that isn't a great distance.

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Summary: A part of me wants to do what Delia did, just walk away.
Review: I admired a large part of this book, Delia's view of her family, Delia's need to leave, Delia's experience with living with herself. I appreciated that Delia, for the first time in her life, could leave home and establish her own self-worth among strangers and be appreciated by those around her in a way that her own family apparently never did. However, Ms. Tyler could have done a better job in estalishing the characteristics of the key players in her book. For example, Sam, I sensed he was distant and somewhat aloof but I never really felt I understood fully why Delia needed to run away from him. And Delia's father -- I would have liked more history regarding their symbiotic relationship, at least that's the type of relationship I thought Ms. Tyler was trying to establish. Also, I wanted to know more about her relationship with her sisters. The ending was disappointing. Delia, at last, seemed to accept the good and bad in herself, and in her husband and her children. Ms. Tyler never really seemed interested in persuing anything profound in her feelings toward Delia's sisters. And what about Joel and Noah who had come to depend on her, actually need and love her. I generally liked Ladder of Years, I related to much of what Delia was going through but in the end the book just did not have enough depth and there was only a cursory exploration of significant characters.

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Summary: Lacking in bedside manner?
Review: I heard the audiocassette. I'm not into romances, so I was pleasantly surprised here: it's not what I would think of as romantic, but it was interesting.

What I found most interesting was how easy Delia found it to leave her family. There seemed to be a significant age gap, maybe fifteen years, between her and her doctor husband, so although it was never made explicit by the author, I think she was just tired of this "old man." She did mention his looking and acting more aged. And he himself says he never had the "bedside manner" his father-in-law had.

Oh, that's another thing: Delia's father was a doctor, too. Are doctors known for being good lovers? Or being paternalistic? I think she feels Dr. Grinstead, her husband, is patronizing her. This is never resolved by the end of the story: she feels sorry for him, and a kind of sentimental or nostalgic remembrance of how he once was, but I don't think she loves him passionately or (can we say it?) sexually.

And I don't know if she'll ever find what she wants. She treats all her men, and her "boys" about the same. She presents as a kind and nurturing, but "dingy" woman, just following her nose, always trying to be helpful but never really knowing what she wants or doesn't want.

So, the story is interesting, and thankfully not romantic. It gives you a lot to think about in your own life, since everybody should be able to relate in one way or another to the characters: the jilted older husband, the jilted younger husband, the jilted teenage groom, the jilting teenage bride, the older couple, Nat and Binkey, with a young baby, the vengeful and resentful ex-wife (the former Mrs. Joel, who resents her father, Nat, starting all over again "at his age"), her needy and unmothered son, the innocent bystanders, the go-betweens, the walk-ons like Courtenay's caller, and, last but not least, the protagonist herself. Diximus.

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Summary: Kept me hooked until the last 4 pages...
Review: I won't bother recounting the unfolding of the story, as others have done that for you. I will say that I was absolutely hooked until the last 4 pages. Then it seemed as if Anne Tyler said, "Well, I had better wrap this up", and wrap it up she did...in an rather surprising and unsatisfying way, if you ask me. I felt like I was dropped on my head, suddenly. I didn't get it at all. I thought that I "knew" and understood Delia right until the end. Nonetheless, I found it a highly engaging read, and I give it 5 stars. I find that I'm revisiting the characters and wondering about them, even now.

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Summary: Starting Over
Review: Running away from a disappointing life and starting a new one... A fantasy for most of us, a reality for Delia Grinstead. Delia walks away from a world in which she is expected to be a doting wife, mother and sister and enters a new one as Miss Grinstead. Delia's new life seems exciting and full of promise but quickly starts to resemble her former one. She gets a job as a receptionist (she was her husband's receptionist) and later ends up cooking, cleaning and caring for a man and his child (sound familiar?) Her new, eccentric friend Belle Flint parallels her cooky aromatherapist sister, Eliza. Anne Tyler does a superb job of describing her characters and capturing their idiosyncrasies, however, I find myself wanting more. I had high hopes for Delia when she began this new life, but was quickly disappointed when I came to the realization that it was just a repeat of the one she left behind. Perhaps this is why Delia has such a strong affinity for cats, the idea of having nine lives. This book is enjoyable for its rich description of character and setting, you'll almost be able to see, taste, and smell Bay Borough, but the ending may just leave you as dissatisfied as Delia Grinstead herself.

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Summary: can't stop thinking about it.......
Review: There was something about this book that draws you in. It is difficult to think of a woman walking out on her family, but I just loved Delia. You want to think she is crazy, hurtful, or mean for walking out, but you simply cannot because she is so innocent and good hearted. This is a great read, and the last couple sentences are ones to savor. Great Book!