FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews The Beginner's Goodbye By Anne Tyler Chatto & Windus, 198pp. £14.99
SOME STORYTELLERS prefer a slow build-up; others come directly to the point. The revered American author Anne Tyler is both subtle and direct. Her candour can take one by surprise, as it does here in the opening sentence of her 19th novel: “The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how other people reacted.” It seems almost businesslike, too precise for its veracity even to be questioned. Tyler writes about real life, and, in common with the finest fiction writers, such as William Trevor and Alice Munro, she does not engage with fantasy, as she is well aware that the ordinary is sufficiently bizarre.
Tyler’s chosen terrain is Baltimore. This new work opens with Aaron, the narrator, being greeted by a neighbour who calls him by name and then appears, at least according to Aaron, to notice his deceased wife at his side: “His eyes widened and he turned to me again.”
We never know if the neighbour’s response was real or imagined. But it doesn’t matter. It is certainly real to Aaron, who appreciates the humour of it all. In Aaron, bereaved husband and a man afflicted, since a flu contracted at the age of two, with minor physical disabilities, Tyler, whose art has consistently triumphed through her uncanny feel for character, has created one of her most credible Everyman figures.
Aaron is 6ft 4in, wry and perhaps mildly eccentric. He works as an editor in his family’s vanity-publishing firm, which specialises in charging writers for the privilege of printing their books, many of which are guides intended to help readers through all aspects of living.
Aaron has always been protected by people, not only his doting mother but also, most assiduously, by his equally tall elder sister, Nandina, who appears to be devoted to him. As she is unmarried and also works in the family business, she has always maintained close contact.
Despite his sheltered life, speech impediment and nervous demeanour (even the office secretary, Peggy, fears for him), Aaron managed to find himself a wife, in the unlikely form of Dorothy Rosales, an abrupt little woman, a doctor, who was more than eight years his senior.
Together they had shared a strange marriage: Dorothy’s identity appeared to have been consumed by her image as a doctor, and she always insisted that, whatever the situation, anyone present was aware of her profession. Early in the novel, Aaron muses: “She was unique among women, Dorothy. She was one of a kind. Lord, she left a hole behind. I felt as if I had been erased, as if I’d been ripped in two.”
Tyler is effortless, wise yet never knowing, and establishes a sense of having thought deeply about the given facts of any story. That life consists of a series of predicaments appears to be her abiding thesis, and truth invariably sustains her novels. She is also sympathetic without being sentimental. She leads Aaron slowly through a remarkably profound realisation of what his relationship with Dorothy actually was.
His tone throughout is mild, with the occasional tinge of irritation. Aaron inhabits a middle-class social space similar to that of many an Anita Brookner character. The material world is largely irrelevant, as it is carefully in place; nor are there any children – at least, not with Dorothy. Tyler spends most of the first chapter allowing the reader to grasp some sense of Aaron’s grief. It is so skilfully handled, without straining for effect: he appears to be announcing to the world in general that he is really quite all right, while leaving little doubt that he is numb. The second chapter begins with another bald statement of fact: “Here is how she died.”
Dorothy’s death is not typical. There is no drawn-out illness, no waiting. After a minor spat, an argument over the cookies she always eats at the end of her working day, a tree falls on to the sun porch, causing horrendous damage. Tyler captures the surrealism of deadly reality by cleverly underwriting what is a very dramatic sequence. The tragedy not only kills Dorothy – and this is not giving anything away, as the publisher’s blurb makes clear what happens – but also robs Aaron of his nest, his home. Into the wreckage enters Gil, the builder.
Admittedly, Gil never really moves beyond being a convenient plot device, but so strong is the slightly distracted, if deliberate, voice of Aaron and his many epiphanies that all else becomes secondary. He is a study of grief, and Tyler, who won a Pulitzer Prize for probably her finest novel, Breathing Lessons (1988), brilliantly allows Aaron not only to gradually unpick his grief but also to analyse his marriage and, most shockingly of all, his behaviour. Slowly he understands that, for all his supposed affection, he never really listened and, contrary to the myth he favours, was offhand. It is a devastating realisation for many reasons, not least for the way Tyler choreographs it, just as she moulds and develops the character of Dorothy, who changes throughout the narrative.
Aware that his family were never that fond of his remote wife, he revisits the reaction to his decision to marry her. “I could tell that people found Dorothy an unexpected choice. My father said she was ‘interesting’ – the same word he used when he was confronted with one of my mother’s more experimental casseroles.”
Late in the novel he retrieves some family photo albums and attempts to restore them from the neglect they have suffered. He looks at pictures of his own wedding. All the while, Aaron is engaged in an act of memory, and through it he remembers the arguments and the difficulty of communicating with Dorothy, a woman most at ease with fact. Finally he asks himself: “Then why was our marriage so unhappy? Because it was unhappy. I will say that now. Or it was difficult . . . Out of sync. Uncoordinated. It seemed we just never got the hang of being a couple.” Ultimately Aaron concedes: “What I do remember is that familiar, weary, helpless feeling, the feeling that we were confined in some kind of rodent cage, wrestling together doggedly, neither one of us winning.”
The Beginner’s Goodbye is a small book. It may not at first seem quite equal to The Accidental Tourist (1985) or Ladder of Years (1995), while Breathing Lessons, as already referred to, remains a major achievement. But this deceptive book is profound and contains some of Tyler’s most accomplished dialogue. Yet again she has articulated the supreme difficulties of human communication in a calmly insightful exploration of love and truth, grief and reality.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent and author of Ordinary Dogs, published by Faber
