Back When We Were Grownups

Back When We Were Grownups
Ann Tyler
Spoilers


Tyler has worked this ground before, but more successfully, in Ladder of Years. Once again we have a middle-aged woman, comfortably ensconced in a large and loud family, who has an existential crisis and embarks on a quest to rediscover or reinvent herself.

In Ladder of Years the actual event is more dramatic -- she leaves her husband and childeren without warning and moves from Baltimore to a small inland town, taking on an administrative job and also becoming a live-in housekeeper to support herself. Here the journey is more muted and mostly internal, although Rebecca Davitch does reconnect with her first sweetheart, a man she had jilted thirty years previously to marry Joe Davitch.

We watch as Rebecca struggles with her lost sense of self, her need to be dutiful, and her ennui, through the lens of the minutiae of her daily life.  The struggle hinges on whether she made a mistake in marrying Joe, a man much older than her, in that she allowed her identity to be drowned by him and the demands of his family.  And Rebecca has indeed drowned  -- she caters to their every whim, soothes their quarrels and hurts, and is companion to their superannuated relatives, while being taken for granted, being dismissed, or being relegated to the background of their lives.  Not only has she been forgotten, but worse they cannot imagine that she has a life outside of their needs, and worst of all, she has forgotten herself.

This is a version of a compelling, universal question, and is what kept me going through the novel, along with the graceful, observant storytelling which I truly enjoyed.  But the struggle to answer this central question is dealt with so restrainedly, in such a matter-of-fact fashion, and is buried in so much detail, that it loses its true urgency, poignancy, and dramatic potential.  This should be a life or death matter.  In some sense, it is a life or death matter, since if Rebecca really made a mistake she has cheated herself out of thirty of the best years of her life.  Alas, Rebecca is not given to drama, and the potentially potent issues of misplaced loyalty, lost love and absent sex are dealt with obliquely if at all.

The story builds in a predictable fashon towards an ending scene that is a little surprising, in that there is no actual epiphany, but a gradual realization that gets cemented by a photo of herself taken at the party where she first met Joe Davitch, thirty years earlier.  She has been having a wonderful time after all.

In the end the book is a paean to the value of small goals and smaller accomplishments.  For what Rebecca does have is the amicable, unamorous companionship of Zeb, Joe's brother; the respect of those around her; and her own sense of compassion and decency.  And the very last line -- that she has indeed been having a wonderful time -- is almost a Zen-like notion, that a small life lived in the moment is ultimately more satisfying than the pursuit of grand ambitions.  But I fear I am reading too much into the novel.  These points, if they exist, are made so subtly and with so little emotional pull that they are all but lost.  This should be a mattter of life and death.  It is a matter of life and death; not simply a matter of how the dinner napkins are folded.

3.5*
May 2011