The Amateur Marriage: A Novel
by Anne Tyler
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Book Summary Information
Author: Anne TylerEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-01-31
ISBN: 0345472454
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Product features:
- Anne Tyler has taken the edgy, imperfect, exasperating moments of marriage and woven a tapestry of life and its changes in the course of a fifty-year relationship.
Book Reviews of The Amateur Marriage: A Novel
Book Review: What marriage used to be
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this when it was first released and then recently re-read it. I hadn't loved it the first time, but the second reading revealed a lot of nuances that I had missed the first time around. It also gave me some good food for thought on why people get married, why they stay married, and why people aren't as interested in getting married these days.
I have a good marriage and my husband and I have a lot of natural compatibility, something the couple in the book (Pauline and Michael Anton) lack. It was curious to me, reading the book, that back in the WWII and immediate post-war days, two people could meet, spend some time together (most of it arguing), have one person go away and then engage in a mostly-unsatisfying long-distance relationship, contemplate breaking up several times, and still think that somehow they would be able to put together a decent marriage. By contrast, my husband and I had, 12 years ago, what many people considered a "fast" courtship period - we were together for a year before we got engaged, and then engaged for a year before we got married, with about a year and a half spent living together. We had known each other a little more than three years by the time we got married and many, many of our friends counseled us to wait longer - my best friend even saying "what can you really know about someone after only being with them for a year?" Pauline and Michael's entire courtship in the book is maybe a year, most of that spent apart while Michael is in the service. People today talk about how "unrealistic" and "pie-in-the-sky" people are about relationships, but it seems to me that back then, courtships were more about two people having superficial interactions in prelude to marriage than actually getting to know each other and discussing mutually-held beliefs and values. Michael and Pauline seem to get married because that's what people do when they've been "going together" for awhile - they get married. (This is the exact explanation one of my grandmothers gave me when I asked her why she had married my grandfather, who she later proclaimed had made her miserable for almost all of their 50-year marriage. She also told me that had she lived with him first - as I was then doing with my eventual husband - she never would have married him.) So much is assumed - they will get married, they will have children, they will live with Michael's mother whether Pauline wants to or not, Michael will work and Pauline will sit home all day, etc. Very little is negotiated and considered, but then decided. I really think it's no wonder so many marriages forged in the 40s, 50s and 60s broke up in the 70s and 80s - the relationships were precipitated on a rigid set of social mores, not actual compatibility between two people.
Which lead me to wonder. Maybe the recent decline in the number of marriages isn't a function of decreased morals or lack of commitment, but a natural outgrowth of the idea that maybe marriage shouldn't be as common as it once was. Maybe finding true, long-lasting, life-building compatibility with another person isn't actually all that common, and marriage shouldn't be as universal as it even is today. Let's face it - what do two 20-year-old people who have seen little of the world know about themselves, or about what it's going to take to live with another person long-term? Especially if their entire courtship has been comprised of a few dates and some light discussion of shallow issues? I think what this book does an excellent job of showing is that the "divorce revolution" may have become possible because of humanism and feminism and civil rights awareness, but the root of it is that marriage used to be more of a social contract between two people of a certain age and disposition, than an institution based on mutual compatibility and shared goals, as it is supposed to be now. The excellent contrast Tyler shows between two courtships - one that is brief, shallow and tumultuous; and a second that is slow, reasoned, and allows two people to really get to know each other - gets to the heart of the issue. The problem with marriage nowadays isn't that people don't want to commit; it's that marriage is a completely different proposition than it used to be, and people enter into it for completely different reasons. Now that you don't need to be married to have sex, have children, buy a house, have companionship, or secure economic survival, the reasons why you WOULD want to get married get a lot more refined and focused.
In any case - the book is a good story, but more than that, it's a portrait of a family the way families used to be - a portrait that is becoming increasingly antiquated (and probably on the verge of considered quaint), but an excellent reminder of the lengthy miserable situations many people found themselves in before liberation (of many different kinds).
Summary of The Amateur Marriage: A Novel
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.
From the Hardcover edition.
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 neighborhood in Baltimore; 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 till they've saved enough to move to the suburbs. There they remain with their three children, until the onset of the sixties, when their eldest daughter runs away to San Francisco. Their marriage survives for a while, finally crumbling in the seventies. 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
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