Books, Arts & Manners: Novel Events

Anne Tyler’s ten novels before the Pulitzer Prize-winning Breathing Lessons are all readily available in cheap paperback editions. Each of them is garnished with a sampling of the kind of criticism Miss Tyler tends to collect (“phenomenal,” “astonishing,” “wonderful,” “marvelous,” “extraordinarily good”), and each features a short back-cover introduction that invites us into the story almost the way radio announcers introduced soap operas years ago (“And when Morgan crashes into the lives of two lovely young newlyweds, no one’s heart is safe”). The novels themselves are painstaking chronicles of the vicissitudes of middle-class family life, and notwithstanding that her hardcover publisher is the prestigious Alfred A. Knopf, one might have felt secure in assessing Miss Tyler as a pop novelist with a large audience probably more female than male.

But on almost all the paperback editions of her works can be found, as well, a rather ominous quotation from an anonymous New York Times reviewer. “Miss Tyler,” we are told, “is steadily raising a body of work of major dimensions.” Her penultimate novel, The Accidental Tourist, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1985 and was made not just into a movie but into a presumably more elegant “movie event,” according to the cover copy. Miss Tyler was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and she has become the subject of scholarly articles and dissertations. And now, for Breathing Lessons, the Pulitzer Prize. What has happened? Has a “major artist” emerged while we weren’t looking? This seems to be the opinion of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which found that with The Accidental Tourist Anne Tyler, writing fiction since 1964, had at last “slipped into the front ranks of American writers.”

CI

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Carol Iannone

Carol Iannone writes on literature and culture.

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Anne Tyler’s ten novels before the Pulitzer Prize-winning Breathing Lessons are all readily available in cheap paperback editions. Each of them is garnished with a sampling of the kind of criticism Miss Tyler tends to collect (“phenomenal,” “astonishing,” “wonderful,” “marvelous,” “extraordinarily good”), and each features a short back-cover introduction that invites us into the story almost the way radio announcers introduced soap operas years ago (“And when Morgan crashes into the lives of two lovely young newlyweds, no one’s heart is safe”). The novels themselves are painstaking chronicles of the vicissitudes of middle-class family life, and notwithstanding that her hardcover publisher is the prestigious Alfred A. Knopf, one might have felt secure in assessing Miss Tyler as a pop novelist with a large audience probably more female than male.

But on almost all the paperback editions of her works can be found, as well, a rather ominous quotation from an anonymous New York Times reviewer. “Miss Tyler,” we are told, “is steadily raising a body of work of major dimensions.” Her penultimate novel, The Accidental Tourist, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1985 and was made not just into a movie but into a presumably more elegant “movie event,” according to the cover copy. Miss Tyler was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and she has become the subject of scholarly articles and dissertations. And now, for Breathing Lessons, the Pulitzer Prize. What has happened? Has a “major artist” emerged while we weren’t looking? This seems to be the opinion of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which found that with The Accidental Tourist Anne Tyler, writing fiction since 1964, had at last “slipped into the front ranks of American writers.”