Books, Arts & Manners: Ordinary People

Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler (Knopf, 327 pp., $18.95)

Though America’s artist class has drawn many of its subjects and much of its financial support from America’s middle class, our painters, sculptors, novelists, and poets have never quite learned to like that majority of Americans who are neither rich nor poor, powerful nor powerless, particularly sophisticated nor hopelessly parochial. Anne Tyler is a case in point, and her attitudes have affected the quality of her fiction.

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.

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Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler (Knopf, 327 pp., $18.95)

Though America’s artist class has drawn many of its subjects and much of its financial support from America’s middle class, our painters, sculptors, novelists, and poets have never quite learned to like that majority of Americans who are neither rich nor poor, powerful nor powerless, particularly sophisticated nor hopelessly parochial. Anne Tyler is a case in point, and her attitudes have affected the quality of her fiction.

About the Author

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a former literary editor at NR, is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and other books.