The aim of Bookdiva is to bring women who love books together, and highlight books that women might want to read.
I’ve written here before about how I find the idea of gendering literature a slightly bizarre, although instinctively interesting, concept. It is difficult not to see the label of ‘women’s writer’ as derogatory – and I would usually resist it for any author I admire. But for once, this month, I am happy to claim it. Because if Anne Tyler is the ultimate example of a ‘women’s writer,’ it’s an accolade indeed.
You’ve probably heard of Anne Tyler. The 70-year-old Baltimore-based author has written 19 novels, as well as two children’s books and numerous short stories. She has won several awards, including the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has had two novels adapted for film and four for TV, and is championed both by critics (John Updike, Michiko Kakutani) and fellow writers (Eudora Wealty, Nick Hornby, Sebastian Faulks).
But you’re very unlikely to have heard from her. Notoriously private, she has not conducted a single face-to-face interview in 35 years and eschews all book tours, press junkets and lectures. That’s why it was a huge coup for Oxford Literary Festival to secure a public appearance last weekend, in which she was presented with the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence and discussed her new novel The Beginner’s Goodbye with chief reviewer Peter Kemp.
Domestic is the most common word used to describe Tyler’s particular brand of brilliance; she is, as the New Statesman’s Lisa Allardice puts it, “drawn to small scale domestic dramas…an exquisite chronicler of the everyday.” Her novels, in which she herself admits that “nothing really happens,” eschew complex plots or experiments with language and form for a focus on character and relationships. She excels in family politics and in creating set pieces where they are put under pressure and exposed; as Kemp reflected, she has a mean way with a disastrous Thanksgiving dinner.
In short, she ticks all the boxes for ‘female literature’. This makes her easy to patronise and easy to underestimate. In 1986 the Chicago Tribune’s John Blades called her “our foremost NutraSweet novelist” and it is true that the majority of the festival audience were women, whose questions were inevitably prefaced by a description of how her novels had, over the years, resonated and enriched their lives.
And in the flesh Tyler is, in some ways, exactly what you might expect. During the interview (which Times subscribers can download as a podcast) she was calm, humble, exquisitely polite and sparing but thoughtful with her words. In his review of The Beginner’s Goodbye, The Washington Post’s Ron Charles accuses Tyler of creating a quaint fallacy out of her home town, “a model-train version of an American city that looks closer to Mayberry R.F.D. than to the largest city in Maryland”; she duly admitted to Kemp that, although she is a huge fan of The Wire, her suburban experience of Baltimore never really intersects with the show’s deprived, drug and violence riven underclass. Asked for her interests outside writing and family, she declared, to much merriment, “I have no life at all”; when prompted for her vision of heaven, she said that it would involve “being in the middle of a novel, having an eleven year old daughter and a new puppy.” Iconoclasm this was not.
But it was also evident that, although authentic, this is also a knowingly offered personal narrative. Tyler’s modesty cannot quite disguise her brilliant intellect, an unwillingness to waste words or dwell on pretentious generalisations, and an unsparing integrity in her aim to tell the truth. She may insist on writing about what she knows – “I feel it would be presumptuous of me to write about say an all-black neighbourhood… I would probably get it horribly wrong” – but she gives no hint that she is ashamed of doing so. That honesty and self-knowledge makes her more powerful, not less.
Any reader of The Beginner’s Goodbye will be in no doubt that, far from dwelling on the surface, Tyler cuts to the heart of experience with an unsentimentally sharp knife. Half ghost story, half elegy, this genre-defying tale of a crippled widower whose grief for his wife apparently exhumes her shade, is not only a love letter to the comfort and nourishment of a loving marriage but an honest dissection of the many barbs and disappointments buried within.
Is it sexist to say that women are generally more intuitive readers (and writers) of social and emotional minutiae than men? Or that they at least tend to be more interested in those minutiae, believing that they can address epic, public issues through the prism of domestic life rather than feeling the need to tackle them head-on?
Perhaps. But I for one am very glad that, forty years on, Anne Tyler remains a ‘women’s writer’. Because under cover of that mild label (which no doubt secures many readers who might be scared by loftier claims), she does quite magnificent, sophisticated things.
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