Part of what I am doing with my reading this year is trying to think about the books in their initial publication context. So if I happen to read something like Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons, published in 1988 and winner of the Pulitizer and finalist for the National Book Award, it’s hard not to look through the nominees and winners of those awards and look for the contrast of styles and picks.
Anne Tyler beat Raymond Carver’s Where I am Calling From — his greatest hits collections, paired with some additional newer stories, and also more or less the last thing he published. These two books are variations on a theme — middle and lower class whiteness and its discontents. I couldn’t imagine two more different looks at that subject than these two books. For one, both authors are too young for WWII and Korea, and too old for Vietnam. And Anne Tyler’s married duo in this book are two young to have children in Vietnam as well. So they are in this middling generation of people in America who have missed the unifying and defining cultural and political moments. And so on the one hand the listlessness and wandering they seem to be experiencing is interesting and real, but on the other hand, it’s entirely empty. That’s why Carver’s book is a much more interesting and cutting and incisive look into this milieu.
She lost the National Book Award to Pete Dexter’s Paris Trout, a book I don’t really know much about and other nominees include Delillo’s LIbra and JF Powers’s Wheat that Springeth Green. So less of a picture here.
Regardless, the book itself is also middling and forgettable. The narration has some weird colloquial wonkyness (“a sack of taco chips”) that doesn’t really sound like how people talk, and isn’t presented as dialect. It’s also just very similar to lots of other books I have read. This is my second Anne Tyler, behind her more recent Shakespeare adaptation Vinegar Girl, which I also didn’t like. So I think I am getting my sense of things.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Breathing-Lessons-Novel-Anne-Tyler/dp/0345485572/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1549030824&sr=8-1&keywords=breathing+lessons+by+ann+tyler)