The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler

From the Publisher

From the inimitable Anne Tyler, a rich and compelling novel about a mismatched marriage—and its consequences, spanning three generations.

They seemed like the perfect couple—young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother’s grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.

Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable.

From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more fully into the complex entanglements of family life in this wise, embracing, and deeply perceptive novel.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Although acquaintances like to think of them as a perfect couple, Pauline and Michael are constantly bickering, sulking and fighting at home. And by cutting back and forth among the viewpoints of different characters, Ms. Tyler is able to provide a kaleidoscopic view of their marriage, and the ripple effect that their contentious relationship has on their children … an ode to the complexities of familial love, the centripetal and centrifugal forces that keep families together and send their members flying apart, the supremely ordinary pleasures and frustrations of middle-class American life.

USA Today - Deidre Donahue

In new novel The Amateur Marriage, Anne Tyler once again displays the qualities of wisdom, insightful writing and compassion that have made the Baltimore resident the most-admired serious yet popular writer working today. One is never embarrassed to be seen reading a Tyler novel.

The New Yorker

This novel of marital unhappiness focuses on a couple whose fraught relationship spans sixty years. In the early days of the Second World War, Michael and Pauline find themselves drawn together despite misgivings and bitter fights. The resulting marriage is a thirty-year clash between her impulsiveness and self-absorption and his taciturnity and barely suppressed rage. Tyler examines their acrimonious bond, which persists even after their eventual divorce, with a keen eye for the minor differences that suddenly widen into chasms. In order to illuminate every facet of the couple’s interactions and personalities, the story is told from several points of view: those of Michael and Pauline and two of their three children. Although Tyler’s prose occasionally slips into banality, she never falters in creating vivid characters whose weaknesses are both credible and compelling.

Publishers Weekly

Because Tyler writes with scrupulous accuracy about muddled, unglamorous suburbanites, it is easy to underestimate her as a sort of Pyrex realist. Yes, Tyler intuitively understands the middle class's Norman Rockwell ideal, but she doesn't share it; rather, she has a masterful ability to make it bleed. Her latest novel delineates, in careful strokes, the 30-year marriage of Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay, and its dissolution. In December 1941 in St. Cassians, a mainly Eastern European conclave in Baltimore, 20-year-old Michael meets Pauline and is immediately smitten. They marry after Michael is discharged from the army, but their temperaments don't mix. For Michael, self-control is the greatest of virtues; for Pauline, expression is what makes us human. She is compulsively friendly, a bad hider of emotions, selfish in her generosity ("my homeless man") and generous in her selfishness. At Pauline's urging, the two move to the suburbs, where they raise three children, George, Karen and Lindy. Lindy runs away in 1960 and never comes back-although in 1968, Pauline and Michael retrieve Pagan, Lindy's three-year-old, from her San Francisco landlady while Lindy detoxes in a rehab community that her parents aren't allowed to enter. Michael and Pauline got married at a time when the common wisdom, expressed by Pauline's mother, was that "marriages were like fruit trees.... Those trees with different kinds of branches grafted onto the trunks. After a time, they meld, they grow together, and... if you tried to separate them you would cause a fatal wound." They live into an era in which the accumulated incompatibilities of marriage end, logically, in divorce. For Michael, who leaves Pauline on their 30th anniversary, divorce is redemption. For Pauline, the divorce is, at first, a tragedy; gradually, separation becomes a habit. A lesser novelist would take moral sides, using this story to make a didactic point. Tyler is much more concerned with the fine art of human survival in changing circumstances. The range and power of this novel should not only please Tyler's immense readership but also awaken us to the collective excellency of her career. (Jan.) Forecast: Expect the usual blockbuster sales-there will be a first printing of 300,000. This is also likely to become one of Tyler's strongest backlist titles. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Tyler makes a strong return with this memorable exploration of personal identity within middle-class family life. Set in the author's favorite locale of Baltimore and its environs, the novel centers on the Antons, a sympathetic but mismatched couple who endure years of unhappy wedlock. The two appear well suited when they meet and fall in love at the beginning of World War II. Outgoing, enthusiastic Pauline, eager to embrace her husband's Polish American traditions, seems the perfect complement to reserved and practical Michael. Raising three children while building the family grocery business initially brings mutual satisfactions; however, neither their increasing prosperity nor a comfortable suburban home can lessen growing tensions, which become unbearable when the couple must face the consequences of a rebellious daughter's disappearance. Unlike the Ryans of Tyler's Breathing Lessons, the Antons have not forged marital bonds strong enough to endure. Their sad story, as dark and ironic as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, is leavened by Tyler's trademark comic details, narrated with characteristic dry and witty understatement. This rewarding work is recommended for most public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/03.]-Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Falls Church, VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Painfully accurate and painfully funny as ever, Tyler's 16th novel (Back When We Were Grownups, 2001, etc.) traces the stormy union of two people who love but can't stand each other. Pauline bursts into Michael Anton's grocery store in December 1941, a bloody handkerchief pressed to the temple she wounded while impulsively jumping off a Baltimore streetcar to join an enlistment parade. In no time flat, she's persuaded Michael to join up, and they're married right after he's discharged. Three children arrive in short order, but it's not long before Michael is wondering, "Was it possible to dislike your own wife?" They're simply not good match: "Pauline tumbled through life helter-skelter while Michael proceeded deliberately . . . . Pauline believed that marriage was an interweaving of souls, while Michael viewed it as two people traveling side by side but separately." She sweeps him off to the suburbs and eventually gets him to move the family grocery store out there too; Michael always ends up doing what she wants while quietly resenting her moods, her enthusiasms, her recklessness. Pauline in turn is infuriated by "his rigidity, his caution, his literal-mindedness . . . his stodginess in bed, his magical ability to make her seem hysterical." Tyler beautifully delineates both spouses' perspectives throughout her episodic narrative, which drops in on the highlights of the Anton's 30-year marriage and the 20-year aftermath of their divorce. (A good technique, except for the terrible mistake of having the story's most vivid character die offstage.) Flashes of tenderness and genuine love serve to underscore the sad fact that they simply aren't suited, and cogent portraits of their childrenreveal the emotional damage they inflicted. Alive as always to life's messy ambiguities, Tyler declines to reach a final conclusion about this "amateur marriage," closing with a lovely image of Pauline's face lighting up with joy as her husband approaches-but it's just in Michael's imagination. So smart, so sensitive, so readable and engaging. Is it churlish to suggest that an author obviously at the peak of her powers should broaden her horizons and push herself a little harder the next time out? First printing of 300,000. Agent: Tim Seldes/Russell & Volkening

Product Details

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Reading Group Guide

Much of the power of Tyler's story comes from the way she follows Michael and Pauline Anton -- the amateurs of the title -- down through the postwar decades that follow their youthful meeting in the heady days following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Capturing the sense of both uncertainty and exhilaration that characterized the mood of the nation, Tyler relates how the careful, methodical Michael encounters impulsive, sparky Pauline at a moment when their very different personalities seem to pull them toward one another -- though later it will be those same differences that drive them apart. Without ever betraying or abusing one another, they nevertheless embark on courses that result in a greater and greater sense of separation.

As Michael and Pauline mature, raise a family, move to the suburbs, and grow steadily more perplexed by one another's stubborn characters, we watch as the cultural changes of the 1960s transform the American cultural landscape -- and when their oldest daughter runs away, the Antons confront the world of drugs and youth culture with a suddenness that strips them of a layer of self-protective denial. Though they forge on together, Michael and Pauline are changed by their loss; when the breaking point unexpectedly comes, it's both a relief and a tragedy. Reading groups will be moved to discuss the ways these two powerful personalities both support and fail one another, and how The Amateur Marriage leads us to see this unhappy union from both perspectives.

Book clubs will also find that Tyler's two-sided approach, in which the narrative moves back and forth between the perspectives of Pauline and Michael, to be revelatory. And woven in between the sections devoted to these two are chapters told from the points of view of their children. In so doing, Tyler suggests that this battle of wills does not dissolve when the principals stop arguing. Rather, it has a life of its own and has shaped their children's personalities and futures, for good and for bad. Readers will discover that Tyler has offered a novel without a hero or a villain, one that nevertheless brilliantly comprehends the extremes of pain and happiness that comprise an "ordinary" family's life.

Discussion Questions from the Publisher

1. What is noticeable about the narrative voice in the first chapter? At the end of the chapter the narrator states, “They were such a perfect couple. They were taking their very first steps on the amazing journey of marriage, and wonderful adventures were about to unfold in front of them” (p. 34). Whose voice is this meant to be? Why is the chapter called “Common Knowledge”?

2. How does the presence of Mrs. Anton affect Michael and Pauline’s marriage? What has made Mrs. Anton so dependent on her son? Is Michael unfair to Pauline in expecting her to care for his mother? Who is Michael more obligated to—his mother or his wife?

3. How is Pauline’s flirtation with Alex Barrow related to the letters she sent Michael while he was away in the army (pp. 54–55)? What does the reader learn about her character in the chapter called “The Anxiety Committee”? Would someone like Alex Barrow have been a better choice for Pauline? What goes through her mind as she sits downstairs alone? Why does she decide not to go out and meet him that night?

4. In its early chapters, The Amateur Marriage gives readers a view of life in an ethnic working-class neighborhood in Baltimore. Later, the setting shifts to a newly built suburb, where the family gradually moves into the middle class. What are the effects of this shift on the family? How does Anton’s experience reflect a change in American family life in the postwar decades?

5. Michael thinks of Pauline as “a frantic, impossible woman, so unstable, even in good moods, with her exultant voice and glittery eyes, her dangerous excitement” (p. 167). Meanwhile Pauline “chafed daily at . . . his rigidity, his caution, his literal-mindedness . . . his reluctance to spend money, his suspicion of anything unfamiliar, his tendency to pass judgment . . . [and] his magical ability to make her seem hysterical” (p. 75). Does the narrative present us with a more positive view of Michael or of Pauline? Who is the more sympathetic character?

6. Pauline enters Michael’s life in a vivid red coat, bleeding because she jumped impulsively from a streetcar to join a parade (pp. 3–5). Does the report of her death in a car accident years later (pp. 275–76) imply that Pauline hasn’t changed? Why does Tyler frame Pauline’s presence in the novel with two accidents?

7. As he posed in the photography studio for a fifteenth-anniversary portrait with Pauline, Michael remembers thinking, “Who was this woman? What did she have to do with him? How could they be expected to share a house, rear children together, combine their separate lives for all time? The knob of her shoulder pressing into his armpit had felt like an inanimate object” (p. 137). The photograph shows “Mr. and Mrs. Perfectly Fine. . . . An advertisement for marriage” (p. 137). Are these thoughts an indication that, for Michael at least, the marriage is doomed? How does this photograph relate to the double portrait described on p. 172? What distinction is Tyler making between the public and private aspects of married life?

8. Reflecting on his marriage, Michael imagines that “all those young marrieds of the war years” have grown “wise and seasoned and comfortable in their roles, until only he and Pauline remained, as inexperienced as ever—the last couple left in the amateurs’ parade” (p. 168). He felt they were “more like brother and sister than husband and wife. This constant elbowing and competing, jockeying for position, glorying in I-told-you-so” (p. 168). How common are the problems that Michael and Pauline experience in their relationship? Is Michael correct in thinking that he and Pauline are unusual in their long-standing “amateur marriage”?

9. Do Michael and Pauline handle their trip to San Francisco well or badly? Why do they take Pagan home without pursuing their attempt to bring Lindy home as well? Why do they never go back and try again? Does the episode suggest that they are both fundamentally passive and ineffectual people? Or does it suggest, on the other hand, that they are realistic and know how to protect themselves from grief?

10. How is the narrative organized, and how do the chapters handle the flow of time? What is achieved in the structure that Tyler has chosen for this novel? Does the narrative point of view tend to illuminate the thoughts of all characters equally? If not, into which characters are we are given more insight and access?

11. In what ways does Tyler distinguish herself from other contemporary novelists you have read? Look closely at a few favorite passages and discuss how she achieves the effects of style, humor, and insight that make her work so enjoyable.

12. “Time,” Anne Tyler has said, “has always been a central obsession of mine—what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own.”* Does Michael’s decision to leave the marriage after thirty years, and his careful courtship of Anna, reveal a desire to redeem lost time? How is his relationship with Anna different from his first marriage? Why doesn’t Pauline remarry?

13. How surprising is the reappearance of Lindy? Why has Lindy never tried to contact Pagan before this? Is her return to the story satisfying or not?

14. To Lindy, the family was like “an animal caught in a trap. . . . Just the five of us in this wretched, tangled knot, inward-turned, stunted, like a trapped fox chewing its own leg off” (p. 300). Does Tyler suggest that such a feeling is natural when people feel alienated from their families or misunderstood by them? What might Michael and Pauline have done differently? Is their helplessness in the face of Lindy’s unhappiness their own fault, or does the novel suggest that there is a limit to what parents can feel responsible for?

15. How are George and Karen affected in their development by the disappearance of Lindy and by their parents’ troubled marriage? Does Tyler suggest that children become themselves in spite of, or in reaction to, family stresses?

16. Anne Tyler has said, “My fondest hope for any of my novels is that readers will feel, after finishing it, that for a while they have actually stepped inside another person’s life and come to feel related to that person.”* Does The Amateur Marriage achieve this goal?

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