The Amateur Marriage

Like all novels by [a:Anne Tyler 457 Anne Tyler https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1529285150p2/457.jpg], the wonderfulness is in the details. Sure, it's a great story about a marriage that starts when WWII starts and ends just after Sept. 11, 2001. Still, it's the little stuff that stays with me.I love how Tyler gets into the husband's and wife's heads. As a married person, I can say this totally reflects how marriages work. The author details what each spouse thinks about what the other spouse says, does, and even what they think they think. The husband thinking about his wife:“She was a good person, really. Well, and so was Michael himself, he believed. It was only that the two of them weren't good. Or weren't . . . what was he trying to say, weren't nice. They weren't always very nice to each other; he couldn't explain just why.”Wife thinking about her husband when she tried a new recipe for dinner:“It would be a miracle if he liked it (there were water chestnuts in it), but for once he didn't make one of his disparaging remarks. Instead, he rose and went to the kitchen for. . . what? For butter. She took it as a reproof; he could have asked her to fetch it. She would have been glad to fetch it. But no, he had to limp all the way across the dining room, all the way into the kitchen and back, swinging his bad leg extra widely from the hip as he tended to do when he was tired. He placed the butter dish in front of his mother and inched back down onto his chair with a grunt. That the butter was for his mother added insult to injury; it implied that Pauline was not properly alert to his mother's needs.”It's the internal lives of the partners in a marriage that add depth to the story. There's what a wife and husband say to one another and then there's what each only thinks to him- or herself. Anne Tyler captured this marriage perfectly. Really none of us knows what were doing when we enter into it. Some just handle better than others. Great read!

Anne Tyler is a master at describing the inner thoughts of people in troubled relationships. At the same time, she normalizes problems in families, ones we can all relate to.