Clock Winder Book

Noting the relationship between my goodreads friends and acquaintances, and Anne Tyler makes me wonder. Is Jane Austen some sort of token? We have to like somebody who writes about domesticity, so...

Is that it? Tyler does indeed write about domesticity. Ordinary people living ordinary lives, mostly in their very ordinary houses. She does this fantastically well and I can't really imagine a more important job a writer could have.

But maybe it is despised precisely for being the things I think are so important. I am astonished by how many people I think should know better who have never read anything by Tyler. She describes ordinary cares and heart break, ordinary despair and ordinary hope with a light touch that makes you realise that she loves all that she brings to the page. She is all-knowing and all-understanding with a modesty that makes her slip by unnoticed by those that need literature to be brash, experimental, obscure or difficult. I am tempted to define the thing people call literature, whilst scorning that which they see as not falling into the genre, as something that IS putdownable. If that is so, then Tyler most dismally fails to make the grade. What a relief.

---------------------


I've given up trying to understand why it is that the amount that this author moves me is inversely proportioned to what I have to say about her. I have no idea how to do justice to her way of making ordinary failed people quicken one's heart.

Let me quote a little instead.

Matthew, whose mother is a dreadful piece of work, asked if Elizabeth finds her hard to put up with.


'No, I like her,' she said. 'Think what a small life she has, but she still dresses up every day and holds her stomach in. Isn't that something?'


And there I sat, as I read this, in my quite small life, and resolved to dress better. Though I rather think I draw the line at holding my tummy in.

Matthew recalls his brother, Tim, who shot himself as Elizabeth attempted to take away the gun - well, I think it was all his own work.


Then a new picture slid in, clicking up from the back of his head: Timothy quarreling with Elizabeth. Only what was it about? Had she broken a date? Refused one? Shown up late for something? All he remembered was the it had happened on the sunporch, over the noise of a TV western. 'If you persist,' Timothy said, 'in seeing life as some kind of gimmicky guided tour where everyone signs up for a surprise destination -' and Elizabeth said, 'What?' Seeing what?' 'Life,' said Timothy, and Elizabeth said, 'Oh, life,' and smiled as fondly and happily as if he had mentioned her favourite acquaintance. Timothy stopped speaking, and his face took on a puzzled look. Wispy lines crossed his forehead. And Matthew, listening from across the room, had thought: It isn't Timothy she loves, then. He hadn't bothered wondering how he reached that conclusion. He sat before the television watching Marshall Dillion, holding his happiness close to his chest and forgetting, for once, all the qualities in Timothy that were hard to take....He forgot them again now, and with them the picture of Timothy triumphantly cocking his pistol and laughing in his family's face. All he saw was that puckered, defeated forehead. He cleared his throat. He felt burdened by new sorrows that he regretted having invited.


I am appalled to report that I once had to defend Anne Tyler against the charge that she was like Jane Austen. P-leeassse. It isn't just that Austen is a vastly inferior writer technically, and a less careful observer of life, but Austen is a social critic, a judge. She has an opinion which is the whole point of what she does. Tyler couldn't be more the opposite, I don't think I've ever read anything as moving as Tyler, which never gives you the least teensiest inkling into what the author thinks. She strikes me as God-like in this sense and more so than any writer I've read. Isn't that something?