Anybody got a new Anne Tyler?

[pluckyduck]

Posting in another thread here made me misty eyed.... I miss Anne Tyler of old!

I discovered her on, geeze, I'm thinking it might have been The Accidental Tourist. Maybe the one before that. Eventually, I bought everything she had ever written, ran through all of that, and anxiously awaited every new book. I'd buy her in hardcover, before there were deep discounts on hardcover, and before I had much cash to throw around.

She started getting weak, to me, with Saint Maybe...but I so utterly detested the last book of hers I read, I threw across the room at the end. It was a (to me) repulsive story about a woman who leaves her husband and her kids for the heck of it and at the end decides to go back to them.

So, no more Anne Tyler. Put me off reading anything really meaningful since. I read Grisham, and Turow and Leahy, the lawyer/crime genre', but I miss what I got from Tyler. Feeling and characters and family, all wrapped up in a gentle quirky spirit. Never soooo depressing, it was always loving.

Is there anybody that you guys know who could fill this void for me?



Andrea

[Joubert[$]]

I'm taking the geek's way out. I wasn't a wild fan of Tyler's, but I enjoyed Tourist and Breathing Lessons. I just hit Amazon, though, to see what they matched for customers buying Tyler also buying. Here's the list:

Alice Hoffman
John Irving
Amy Tan
Lee Smith
Richard Russo

They're all pretty well known, I guess, with the exception of Lee Smith. I knew he was a dangerous pitcher in the 9th, but didn't know he could also write.

[pluckyduck]

Originally posted by joubert
I'm taking the geek's way out. I wasn't a wild fan of Tyler's, but I enjoyed Tourist and Breathing Lessons. I just hit Amazon, though, to see what they matched for customers buying Tyler also buying. Here's the list:

Alice Hoffman
John Irving
Amy Tan
Lee Smith
Richard Russo

They're all pretty well known, I guess, with the exception of Lee Smith. I knew he was a dangerous pitcher in the 9th, but didn't know he could also write.

Oh, thanks, but, unfortunately Amazon doesn't know me as well as they think.

Okay, I've never read Lee Smith and Richard Russo...but Hoffman, Irving and Tan don't scratch the itch, although I've read them and appreciated. I love Pat Conroy, who is a much better writer than Tyler, but he still doesn't do the exact same thing.

Tyler did the dysfunctional family thing with love and charm. My God, the family she made in Accidental Tourist ....those people were alive and breathing in my living room as I tore through the book.

The turkey!!! The spinster sister nearly poisoned the family with the turkey, and Jules (or was it Julius?) ate the turkey...and ended up just falling into the dysfunction of the family, just as whosiswhats (main character) was breaking free.

I want dysfunction with warmth, whose got it?

Andrea

[hadassahchana[$]]

I was so please with myself- as soon as I heard this review on NPR, I just knew who wanted this book!

It is 'The Uphill Walkers' by Madelaine Blais. It sounded wonderful. It is a memoir of a "large, warm and entirely dysfunctional Irish-American family..." The part which was read on the air sort of reminded me of Anne Tyler.

Will that do?

Cindy (we need a 'keeps fingers crossed' smilie!)

[Grouch]

To my shame and discredit, I've never read anything by Anne Tyler (though I have nearly her entire body of work sitting on my bookshelf). Always meant to get around to her, but other books keep popping up, demanding my immediate attention. However, I hear the book she just released this month, Back When We Were Grownups is quite good--perhaps not a full return to the early Tyler, but better than the recent novels. Or so I've heard.

As for Lee Smith...she is an absolutely marvelous Southern writer, criminally underread by the American reading public. She's quirky, funny and occasionally dips into dysfunction (Redlass, you listening?). She is one of my absolute favorites of the 20th Century Southern Renaissance. (Of course, I'm a teensy bit biased since she once judged a writing contest in which one of my short stories earned an honorable mention.) I would start with Oral History or Family Linen and go from there.

[pluckyduck]

Oh, thank you!

I'm going to try both Blais and Smith......Grouch, all you had to say was "Southern writer". Even if Smith isn't Tyler, (who writes Baltimore the not South not North place), I'm a sucker for dysfuctional Southern (Conroy), because I'm the daughter of a daughter of the South.

Now, Mr. Grouch, please, get thee to an earlier Tyler. I recommend Accidental Tourist for a guy, even though I'd have to pick Breathing Lessons as her absolute best. I'm confident that anyone, anywhere could enjoy Accidental Tourist for the characterizations alone.

As far as my trying a new Tyler goes, I really don't think so. I felt so betrayed by that book-whose-name-I-have-blocked, I don't think I could go there again. It's like having a friend who somehow becomes sour and embittered. Where's the motivation to pick up the phone and ask her out for lunch again?

Andrea
off to Amazon....

[AmyBean2]

I've read the new one. I don't consider myself a REAL reviewer, but I didn't like the characters. They all bugged me and it made it hard to like the story.

This is just my personal preference, but I didn't recommend the book.

[pluckyduck]

Originally posted by AmyBean2
I've read the new one. I don't consider myself a REAL reviewer, but I didn't like the characters. They all bugged me and it made it hard to like the story.

This is just my personal preference, but I didn't recommend the book.

Sigh. Thanks.

That's what I'm talking about.....her characters were always flawed and eccentric and yet charming at the same time. Ladder of Years, ( I finally looked it up) is the book that I threw across the room four years ago. I was supposed to care about a mother who, for totally selfish reasons, decided to abandon her husband and her teenage children, without telling them where she was, and create an entirely new identity. Tyler wrote as if the abandonment had no effect on the children and certainly no effect on the main character.

Was the idea of completely reinventing oneself one day interesting? Absolutely. I kept waiting for the moment that Tyler would redeem this woman somehow. I kept waiting for the "aha", I see what I have done is wrong....or, at the very least, for Tyler to point out the futility of such self absorption, instead I felt like she glorified, or at the very least, justified it.

Reinvention of oneself and/or the examination of the path of life is Tyler's recurring theme throughout her books. She does it most brilliantly in Breathing Lessons or Accidental Tourist, depending on your personal taste...but never before did she even suggest that it was okay to screw anyone in your path for the sake of reinvention. In Ladder of the Years, I felt like that was her whole point, screw 'em all....either that or that there is no point because no one really cares anyway. Leave? Shrug. At the very end, the main character just goes back...and oh? you're back? Okay.

Grrrrrr... I'm getting myself all hot and bothered.

Andrea
off to find her new Anne Tyler

[hadassahchana[$]]

Andrea,

this isn't about an interesting but odd character from an Anne Tyler novel (I adored 'Accidental Tourist'), but it is one of my favourite books about really , uh,'different' families (like mine! )

It is an autobiography, but it is absolutely hilarious. 'My Family And Other Animals' by Gerald Durrell. It's about Durrell's childhood- growing up in the midst of a certifiably eccentric British family in Corfu. He grew up to become a famous naturalist as well as author of quite a few books. I love this, my kids love it, and my husband, who is a Brit, loves it, too.

Of course, that's because we're also 'delightfully different'.

Cindy

[amykhar]

I read Back When We Were Grownups, and wasn't thrilled with it. It was OK, but nothing that I would tell anyone to run out and buy.

Amy