The Amateur Marriage - Softcover

Tyler, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099469596 ISBN 13: 9780099469599

Publisher: Vintage, 2004

Synopsis

Michael and Pauline seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment she walked into his mother's grocery store in Baltimore, he was smitten, and in the heat of World War II fervour, they marry in haste. From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counter-culture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayers of later years, we watch their lives unspool and see the consequences of their very mismatched marriage.

OVER A MILLION ANNE TYLER BOOKS SOLD

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‘Anne Tyler has no peer’ Anita Shreve

‘My favourite writer, and the best line-and-length novelist in the world’ Nick Hornby

‘A masterly author’ Sebastian Faulks

‘Tyler is not merely good, she is wickedly good’ John Updike

‘I love Anne Tyler’ Anita Brookner

‘Her fiction has strength of vision, originality, freshness, unconquerable humour’ Eudora Welty

About this title

Review:

Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage is not so much a novel as a really long argument. Michael is a good boy from a Polish neighbourhood in Baltmore; Pauline is a harum-scarum, bright-cheeked girl who blows into Michael's family's grocery store at the outset of World War II. She appears with a bloodied brow, supported by a gaggle of girlfriends. Michael patches her up, and neither of them are ever the same. Well, not the same as they were before, but pretty much the same as everyone else. After the war, they live over the shop with Michael's mother until they've saved enough to move to the suburbs. There they remain with their three children, until the onset of the 60s, when their eldest daughter runs away to San Francisco. Their marriage survives for a while, finally crumbling in the 70s.

If this all sounds a tad generic, Tyler's case isn't helped by the characteristics she's given the two spouses. Him: repressed, censorious, quiet. Her: voluble, emotional, romantic. Mars, meet Venus. What marks this couple, though, and what makes them come alive, is their bitter, unproductive, tooth-and-nail fighting. Tyler is exploring the way that ordinary-seeming, prosperous people can survive in emotional poverty for years on end. She gets just right the tricks Michael and Pauline play on themselves in order to stay together: "How many times", Pauline asks herself, "when she was weary of dealing with Michael, had she forced herself to recall the way he'd looked that first day? The slant of his fine cheekbones, the firming of his lips as he pressed the adhesive tape in place on her forehead". Only in antogonism do Michael and Pauline find a way to express themselves. --Claire Dederer, Amazon.com

Review:

"A brilliant writer...funny, tragic, wise" (Lynne Truss Independent)

"Anne Tyler is a formidably skilful story-teller, with every narrative trick at her effortless command" (Daily Telegraph)

"Tyler's compelling, moving and often amusing tale is the story of any marriage - every page brings a smile of recognition to the reader" (Daily Mail)

"The meanings of this beautifully written novel reach far wider than Baltimore. I shed a tear as I finished the Antons' story" (Evening Standard)

"Tyler is an exquisite chronicler of the everyday" (Observer)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0099469596
• ISBN 13: 9780099469599
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320