Product Description

'My favourite writer, and the best line-and-length novelist in the world' Nick Hornby, Independent on Sunday

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54540 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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

Synopsis
From the incomparable Anne Tyler, a rich and compelling novel, spanning three generations, about a mismatched marriage - and its consequences. 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 counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayers of later years, Anne Tyler captures the nuances of everyday life with telling precision and sly humour.

From the Publisher
From the incomparable Anne Tyler, a rich and compelling novel, spanning three generations, about a mismatched marriage - and its consequences.

Customer Reviews

1st Anne Tyler read - very enjoyable
This was my first Anne Tyler and I really enjoyed it. I bought it at the airport and hoped I would like it and did.

The story was amusing and the characters engaging. I am now reading "Digging for America" by her and that is not quite as good.

Don't expect much of a story, though!
The Amateur Marriage is a lovely novel; Michael and Pauline are well-drawn and Pauline in particular is quite good entertainment value; I really felt quite sympathetic towards her despite herself. It's a nice book to read if you're in the mood for something quite slow-paced and a bit literary, the kind of book that lets you delve into the characters' heads.

For someone after an engaging plot, I wouldn't recommend it. It's interesting to watch Michael and Pauline grow older and develop (or not), but I felt like not enough was said about their children - Lindy was eternally surrounded by a mysterious blank which I never felt was resolved, and almost nothing was said about George and Karen, the younger two. In turn, this made me wonder why; why was the author seemingly withholding information and detail? It broke my suspension of disbelief that I was having to step outside the book before I'd even finished it. Although, to look at it another way, the answers are rarely cut and dried in real life either. The Lindy plotline/character is something I can imagine affecting a real family, and perhaps what we learn of Lindy's childhood, family background and the type of girl she was should give us all the information we need - no more than her own family have, anyway.

It was my first Anne Tyler book, and I liked it enough to read a couple of her other books, neither of which I enjoyed as much. Michael and Pauline are quite exceptional characters in that way, that they engage your heart and stay with you after. But I guess in the end with The Amateur Marriage, it's a question of taste and of what kind of book you're after.

I've given it four stars, but maybe 3.5 is more like it, in terms of enjoyment.

Another great novel from Tyler
There is something deeply thoughtful and a little unsettling about every Tyler novel. There is the unsettling tendency of the characthers to suddenly flip, throw caution and fidelity to the wind, and start again. There is no healing, just a jettisoning of all that has gone before. There is no forgivness and healing in her novels. And, yet they are matter of fact and not a bit bleak. The question therefore arises: are the characthers reflective beings or are they pure instinctual. Perhaps the latter tendency is a reflection of the epoch we live in.