Reviewed by Vicki Carver

Anne Tyler is a highly respected author of fiction who has written 16 novels such as Dinner At the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist and Back When We Were Grownups. Tyler’s writing style incorporates everyday events which seem so mundane and ordinary and transforms them into significant, life altering situations.

The Amateur Marriage is Tyler’s newest novel and covers the lives of the Anton family through a span of sixty years. Michael Anton meets Pauline Barclay in 1941 just after Pearl Harbor has occurred. Many young men in Michael’s Baltimore neighborhood are enlisting and Michael inadvertently joins the ranks of becoming a soldier. He is smitten with Pauline, the “girl in the red coat”. After Michael is discharged from military service due to a hip injury, he and Pauline resume their whirlwind courtship and hastily marry.

The underlying problem which is conveyed repeatedly in The Amateur Marriage is that Michael and Pauline are not compatible and their married life is full of turmoil and anger. They have three children and ultimately confront the tumultuous decade of the 1960’s while residing in their 1950’s tract home in Elmview Acres, in a newly developed suburb.

Liddy, Michael and Pauline’s oldest child, causes them much heartbreak by running away from home and they are forced to raise her son, Paton. Therefore, their middle years are not years of more freedom but of responsibility for their grandson. Michael and Pauline continue to torment each other until their 30th anniversary when their married life is shattered and they are forced to make huge changes in their lives.

Tyler’s writing style pulls the reader into the story and makes the unfolding plot so believable. It is likely that part of Tyler’s success as a writer is that the reader can so easily relate to the characters and identify with the quirky, uneven events which influence their lives so dramatically. We can visualize ourselves in the characters and become drawn to them as people who are trying to do the best they can in an unpredictable, uncertain world.