The Amateur Marriage

From the back of the book: Michael and Pauline seemed like the perfect couple – young, good looking, made for each other. The moment she walked into his mother’s grocery store in Baltimore, he was smitten, and in the heat of World War II ferour, they marry in haste. From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multi-layers of later years, Anne Tyler captures the nuances of everyday life with telling precision and sly humour.

It’s been a while but it seems I’ve found a new author. Don’t you love it when that happens? The best parallel I can make is Richard Yates who, as you know all to well, is one of my favourite writers. The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler explores the same unsatisfying reality of everyday life of Yates’ novels and the amazing knack that we have of ignoring underlying frustrations and unhappiness in favour of family cohesion and, we think, ‘happiness’. I have been told that Anne Tyler’s subjects and plots are not quite so narrow as Yates but her writing still reads with the same fluidity and, with the risk of sounding corny, beauty.

The novel really gets under your skin. I found myself welling up multiple times at seemingly insubstantial events and constantly seeking for a character to blame every time something ‘went wrong’. By the end, I came to the realisation that everyone and no one is to blame and how strikingly the novel is a reflection of life, whether the individual events are relevant or not.

I’ve made the whole book sound incredibly serious and yes, there are profound narrative threads running through it, but it’s a more enjoyable read than that – and there’s definite humour, as in every family. The blurb puts it best: “Anne Tyler captures the nuances of everyday life with telling precision and sly humour”. You can simply read it for its writing, for its characters and be as subjective or objective as you like. There is something and someone in this book for everyone.

9/10