The story of a broken family that tries its darndest to pretend it isn’t.
Pearl marries Beck Tull after she has resigned herself to being an old maid, and never quite forgives him for taking so long to meet her. Her cold perfectionism eventually drives him away and her stubborn denial prevents her from ever commiserating with her three children over the loss. Left to themselves, Cody, Ezra and Jenny – in order of descending age – cope with her emotional reclusiveness and silent martyrdom in different ways. While Cody lashes out, Ezra plays the door mat and Jenny seeks her mother’s approval above all else, at her own expense.
The children grow up to start families of their own or to fail in the attempt. In typical Freudian fashion, Pearl’s unswerving regard for Ezra leads Cody to the understanding that all women favor his younger brother over him. This idea becomes an obsession in the form of Ruth, the only chance Ezra has for marital bliss but for Cody’s plot to steal her away. It isn’t until the end of the book that his misplaced patricidal anger finally finds its true aim. Meanwhile Jenny, unable to liberate herself from her mother’s approval, dooms herself to the same fate. Her inability to be intimate stifles her relationships with three husbands, a biological child, several stepchildren, and even with herself. Ezra champions the idea of bridging the distance between the members of the Tull family with the help of his restaurant. It becomes his life work to bring his siblings and mother together in an ongoing attempt to finish a meal together. In the end, his goal is only partially realized. diflucan
Anne Tyler’s husband is a psychiatrist, and it shows. carisoprodol Obsessive/compulsive disorder, depression, paranoia, denial, anorexia and projection (of personal fault onto another) all play such strong roles in this story that they might be characters themselves. The story often reads more like a case history than a novel. I got the sense from it that Tyler was running some sort of experiment in which she started a family in a petry dish, plucked the father out and recorded the results with detailed notes. She just didn’t draw me in, and it’s partly due to her writing style. She chose to write in third person limited point of view (she wrote about the perspective of one character at a time) while, in my opinion, maintaining her own documentary voice all the way through. I felt like her characters had some life in them, but there was no access to it through her heavy-handed narrative – the lid on the petry dish.
The format reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, which is a much more interesting read. Poisonwood is epistolary in format, so the characters really come alive through their own distinct voices as they chronicle their experiences in the Congo with an overbearing missionary father. Tyler need not necessarily have chosen the same format to be effective, but I couldn’t help but feel that the Tull children’s responses to their overbearing mother were little more than Tyler’s hypotheses. It felt too much like a textbook and not enough like life.
The part I liked most about the book was getting to know Pearl Tull and her children in the first half. Pearl was intriguing in the beginning, and Tyler really got me anxious to see what this scorned woman was going to do, how she was going to crack. I was enchanted by the rebel Cody and his obsession with his younger brother (and cared little about Ezra – he was boring) and by Jenny’s short-term fall from her mother’s good graces and the damage it caused.
But in the end, I found the story lacked focus. Tyler included too much about Jenny’s family for me to care. Ezra never provided very much thematic material except as a foil for Cody, while the rebel largely turned out to be a one-trick pony. I see almost no character development. Though I was asking the questions Tyler wanted me to ask in the beginning, by the end I didn’t care about the answers.
I haven’t read anything else by Tyler. If you have and recommend another work I might like better, please let me know.
-Matt
