Anne Tyler: a life's work
Before the publication of her 19th novel, Anne Tyler hadn't given a face-to-face interview for nearly 40 years. She talks about grief, why her male characters aren't wimps and the reason she has shunned publicity for so long.
Mark Lawson on why male readers love her work
If you were to pop by Anne Tyler's house in leafy Roland Park, Baltimore, on a Tuesday afternoon, you might interrupt her and five women friends deep into an episode of The Wire. They have seen all five seasons three times, and are discussing how soon they can begin a fourth viewing.
Nearly all of her 19 novels are set in Baltimore, where she has lived since 1967, and she has become so synonymous with the city that they run Tyler tourist trips. But fans will know that her fictional Maryland is a world away from that of detective Jimmy McNulty and co. "It is very true to Baltimore," she says of the series. "It is a very pocketed city. We walk the same streets, the drug dealers are doing their business and I'm doing mine, and we almost don't see each other." There's no swearing in Tylerland, never mind narcotics.
Today, Tyler is in London. In the literary world this is news. Before the publication of her latest novel, The Beginner's Goodbye, she hadn't given a face-to-face interview for almost 40 years – and before that she gave only two. Her reluctance to submit to the demands of today's publicity machine means that any newspaper feature (there are remarkably few) inevitably compares her to the reclusive Salinger.
But when we meet, on a sunny spring morning in Kensington, it's hard to imagine anyone less like the irascible Salinger; with her silver fringe, upright posture and smiling eyes, she radiates equanimity, friendliness and goodness, if that doesn't sound too Tylerish. Literary editors and journalists had given up even inquiring if she might grant an interview – why has she agreed now?
"It's sort of whimsical. I'm 70. And I thought, why not?" The same answer she gave to her husband when he asked her to marry him.
Like the equally prolific John Updike, Tyler's subject has been the everyday lives of middle-class America over more than half a century, her writing an attempt, to borrow Updike's phrase, "to give the mundane its beautiful due". With its gently melancholy portrayals of family relationships, affectionately drawn misfits and redemptive storylines, Tyler's fiction is as distinctive as the opening credits of The Wire, and has just as fervent a cult following, and a longer-established one. Since Updike set her on her way in an early New Yorker review, pronouncing her "not merely good, but wickedly good", novelists and critics have outdone each other in their praise. Eudora Welty, whom Tyler calls "my crowning influence", wrote: "If I could have written the last line of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, I'd be happy for the rest of my life." Even the New York Times's much-feared critic Michiko Kakutani has given her rave reviews. One of her most outspoken champions (perhaps surprising, given the "blokeishness" of his own work) is Nick Hornby, who has said his ambition is to be "the male Anne Tyler" and credits The Accidental Tourist as the inspiration to begin writing himself, describing her as "the best line-and-length novelist in the world".
In outline, The Beginner's Goodbye, the story of a man coming to terms with the death of his wife, reads like a Tyler inventory: the Baltimore setting; the limp (literally) male narrator, with a slightly eccentric job in publishing; the uneasy marriage between two opposites; a random tragedy that propels the protagonist towards self-knowledge and change.
Her usual process for beginning a novel is to turn to an index box in which she has written ideas or snatches of conversations and left them to ripen for years ("and I mean years"), often passing the same card over and over until she feels she can make something of it. The planning stage always takes her "exactly a month" before her subconscious tells her "OK, enough is enough."
In this instance, however, Aaron, the main character, spoke to her – something that usually happens when she is much further along. "Yes, I know how fey that sounds," she says, grimacing. "I was still in the very beginning, the month of looking at that sheet of white paper and saying what can I possibly do? And I heard a voice say in my brain very clearly: 'The strangest thing about my wife's return from the dead was how other people reacted.' A few minutes later the voice said: 'I have a couple of handicaps. I may not have mentioned that.'" She loved the slight duplicity of his tone, which told her it had to be a first-person narrator, something she usually considers "a bit of a cheat".
Although her parents were believers, she gave up on religion when she was seven, the age she feels was in some ways "the climax of my life, when you finally know who you are. I started thinking very seriously about God and I thought I just can't do it, so that was sort of that." Her 1992 novel Saint Maybe was an attempt to inhabit a character the most opposite to her she could think of – "and that was a concretely religious person".
She graduated at 19, wanting to be an artist, but instead fell into writing, publishing her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, when she was 23. With uncharacteristic vehemence, she says she wishes she could destroy her first four books. "Just wipe them out. I didn't know what I was doing. I was just finding my way." Her ninth, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, was published when she was just 40. Many, including Tyler, consider it to be her best novel ("it is the one that came closest to what I envisaged at the beginning"). She followed it up three years later with The Accidental Tourist, which won the Book Critics Circle award and was made into the Oscar-winning film starring William Hurt and Geena Davies. Both these novels were finalists for the Pulitzer prize; she won it with her next, Breathing Lessons, in 1988.
During this time she had two daughters, and wrote about the difficulty of balancing writing with motherhood in an essay called "Still Just Writing": "Women writers who have raised children probably have different looking brains by the time they are through, they've learnt to compartmentalise so well." Her daughters are both artists – one a painter, the other a children's illustrator, for whom Tyler wrote a children's book for her to illustrate, "to get her started". She has two grandchildren.
She says that over the years she learnt "just to go to my room and plug away. It doesn't take very long for most writers to realise that if you wait until the day you are inspired and feel like writing you'll never do it at all."
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