Anne Tyler is a powerhouse of a name, with major bestsellers like The Accidental Tourist and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. When I saw the blurb on the back of The Amateur Marriage, summarizing the plot as two people who are opposite personalities who never should've married, I began to worry. How would a popular "relationship" writer like Tyler handle such a cliché storyline?
Pauline is a flighty, impulsive girl when Michael --even-tempered and methodical -- meets her. They are young, and in the pre-WWII maelstrom of emotions the country finds itself in the throes of, they decide they are in love. Michael enlists in the Army, swept up in Pauline's patriotism. He writes to her -- his girl back home -- every day. She writes only sporadically.
Michael returns home after an accident in special training that leaves him wirth a permanent limp. He and Pauline marry because it's assumed they will, and here's where the real trouble begins. It's more than obvious that the two are a complete mismatch, and, unfortunately, Tyler keeps her characters in this one-dimensional realm of stereotypes throughout her story. Pauline remains flighty and impulsive, Michael remains dull and methodical. And all the situations Tyler writes around these two characters only seem to serve to emphasize this to the reader. Get it? Pauline is flighty! Do you see? Michael is too boring for her! See? See?
Tyler never allows Michael to be impulsive and flighty, never gives Pauline a chance at a deeper emotion ... until about 200 pages into the book, by which time I could not care less what happened to them.
It's very unfortunate that Tyler presents so many of these stereotyped characters, including the rebellious daughter who runs away and joins a religious cult, giving the reader little insight as to what makes them tick. Characters seem to do things for no apparent reason except to reinforce the one-dimensional trait Tyler conferred on them at the novel's start.
Unfortunately, since this is the only Tyler novel I have read, it makes me reluctant to pick up another. Tyler surely cannot have gotten her strong reputation if all of her novels' characters were as shallowly drawn. Perhaps one day I will get up the gumption to try Tyler again. Just not anytime soon.
