Amateur Marriage
By Anne Tyler, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004

Anne Tyler has a special talent. She can create characters that are flat and unbelievable, and still, by the end of one of her novels, she can make you care about them. It’s the same talent exhibited by a cartoonist or a caricaturist: there’s nothing naturalistic or convincing in the drawn lines themselves, but a few skillful strokes of the pen can make a picture that evokes the spirit, if not the precise form, of the subject. That’s what Tyler does: she draws a competent outline that allows the reader to fill in the empty spaces, and the end product is a group of characters, and a story, that manages to be effortlessly poignant.

The Amateur Marriage is just such an outline, a story without frills about a relationship that spans more than half a century, from the early days of World War II to the present. Michael Anton is a young man working in his mother’s grocery store in a Polish neighborhood in Baltimore when, in early December 1941, he meets Pauline, a beautiful young girl from another neighborhood. Their romance is as much a product of patriotic fervor as it is of true love, and when Michael returns from basic training with a wound that will prevent him from ever seeing combat, the pair are launched into a stormy marriage that will challenge their resolve for years to come. There are tests of fidelity, the trials of rebellious children, unexpected responsibilities and the turmoil caused by a shifting economy.

Through their entire relationship, though, the biggest barrier between the Antons and happiness is the conflict between their personalities. Michael is aloof and complacent, always willing to let sleeping dogs lie, while Pauline is volatile and passionate, easily agitated and often unreasonable. They chafe at one another until, eventually, something in their relationship is forced to give.

There is nothing remotely convincing about any of the contexts in which Tyler places her characters. The 1940s Polish neighborhood in which Michael and Pauline meet feels no more authentically ethnic than Sesame Street. It is, instead, a movie set piece in which people act the way they are supposed to act in the days after Pearl Harbor. The counterculture haven of 1960s San Francisco is only moderately more genuine, although one could argue that the naive way in which Michael and Pauline see these surroundings is indicative of a pair of middle-aged parents who haven’t a clue about the situation they’ve stumbled upon. Tyler’s prose is not the kind of detail-rich writing that forces empathy from the reader through the sheer weight of its specificity. She can be forgiven for painting her backgrounds with broad, superficial strokes because her aim is not to create a world that is indistinguishable from our own.

What Tyler sets out to create, instead, is just what the title of the book implies: a simple portrait of an unexceptional marriage. The bond between Michael and Pauline is not, perhaps, what we see in our own marriages. Maybe we - we and our spouses - are more compatible. Maybe we don’t argue the way that Michael and Pauline do, irrationally and hurtfully. Maybe we never say out loud - maybe we never even think to ourselves - that we wish we’d never gotten married. Maybe this isn’t us. But maybe, probably, we’ve seen marriages like this one. Maybe our parents were this way, or maybe our grandparents, or our best friends. They were the ones who were always arguing, who seemed to be so completely wrong for each other but who stuck together, ostensibly for the children, but probably more because everyone expected them to stay together. Like Michael and Pauline, they came together with such power, with such romance, that no one can imagine that they would ever separate. They strain against each other, they never really fit and, even if you can never quite figure out which of them, if either, is to blame for their problems, you cannot deny that there are problems. And, most confusingly, although they look for all the world as if they hate each other, there is no doubt that they are irrevocably, tragically in love with one another. This is the sort of relationship that Tyler describes with such subtle and unassuming skill that you’re likely not to even notice how attached you’ve become to the characters, not until the final emotionally wrenching page.

The Amateur Marriage, although set primarily in the decades between the start of World War II and the end of the Viet Nam conflict, is not a period piece. Anyone looking for an accurate rendition of America and Americans during this period is going to walk away essentially empty-handed. The story of Michael and Pauline is not one that depends on any particular historical context, however, and Tyler does not undermine her book by failing to accurately and completely render the world around them. Their marriage is the important thing, and it is there in all its weight and bluster, for better or for worse, until the bitter end.

Copyright 2004 Ad Media Inc.