Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
ABOUT MAGGIE, WHO TRIED TOO HARD
September 11, 1988
BREATHING LESSONS
By Anne Tyler
327 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $18.95.
Anne Tyler, who is blessedly prolific and graced with an effortless-seeming talent at describing whole rafts of intricately individualized people, might be described as a domestic novelist, one of that great line descending from Jane Austin. She is interested not in divorce or infidelity, but in marriage -- not very much in isolation, estrangement, alienation and other fashionable concerns, but in courtship, child raising and filial responsibility. It's a hectic, clamorous focus for a writer to choose during the 1980's, and a mark of her competence that in this fractionated era she can write so well about blood links and family funerals, old friendships or the dogged pull of thwarted love, of blunted love affairs or marital mismatches that neither mend nor end. Her eye is kindly, wise and versatile (an eye that you would want on your jury if you ever had to stand trial), and after going at each new set of characters with authorial eagerness and an exuberant tumble of details, she tends to arrive at a set of conclusions about them that is a sort of golden mean.