Reviews for Brenda's place

The average rating for Brenda's place based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-21 00:00:00 Ken Greenaway I finished reading Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons a week ago, but I found myself thinking about it a lot, especially during the recent holidays. Tyler's specialty is family and marriage, and while sitting down to countless meals, chatting with parents, siblings, in-laws, nieces, nephews, extended relatives and seeing little grievances and grudges pop up and then be gently patted back down, hearing current events be analyzed in smart or odd or even offensive ways, seeing patterns (some good, some regretful) emerge among family members… I realized how well the author knows people. On the surface, Breathing Lessons, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988, seems like such a simple tale. Set during a single day, it tells the story of Maggie and Ira Moran, a middle-aged Baltimore couple who set out one morning to attend the funeral of the husband of Maggie's best friend, Serena, in Deer Lick, Pennsylvania, 90 miles away. Maggie, who's got an (over)active imagination, also gets it into her head to visit Fiona, her ex-daughter-in-law, and her grandchild. She secretly wants Fiona and her son Jesse to get back together again. She thinks, rightly or wrongly, that they still love each other, and that their constant skirmishes and their pride have kept them apart. That's the story - "in a nutshell," as one of Tyler's characters might say. But that's certainly not the book. Tyler is so good at adding texture and incident to characters, so their lives feel rich and real. The way Maggie and Ira initially get together is surprising but feels right. Ira's early home life - he oversees his father's frame shop and helps support his two sisters - will change how you feel about him later on when he might seem like a smug, cold, solitaire-playing curmudgeon. Some of the book's early sequences are just stand-alone brilliant. At the funeral, Serena demands that everyone who sang at her wedding sing the same song at her husband's funeral. The mourners are mortified, but someone comes through with a lovely gesture. (Side note: Pay attention to those songs, from "True Love" to "Love Is A Many Splendored Thing." They bring up thematic material that resonates throughout the book. What Ira whistles to himself will tell you a lot about what's on his mind. And near the end there's a song playing in a supermarket that Maggie and Ira begin harmonizing to... I didn't recognize it, so looked it up on Apple Music. It stuck in my head for days. I can see how the Morans knew it so well.) And another sequence, a lengthy one set on a highway, gives you a glimpse at a relationship that's lasted even longer than Ira and Maggie's. This whole section demonstrates what Tyler does so well: mix straight on observation with comedy and a streak of melancholy, all written in a recognizable, middle-American vernacular. The gentle and often not-so-gentle bickering between Tyler's characters reminded me of the banter between my father (taciturn, solitary) and my late mother (gregarious, always chatty with strangers, scattered, well-meaning). Tyler has affection for her characters, however flawed, and she understands the small and big mistakes and compromises they've made on the road of life. Don't be surprised if you start questioning whether Maggie did the right thing at a critical moment in Fiona's (and Jesse's) life. This isn't the showiest book I read in 2015. But it's one of the wisest and the most humane. I still think Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant is Tyler's masterpiece, and there are unforgettable things about The Accidental Tourist. But this is almost as good.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-05-28 00:00:00 Christopher Peace A day in the ordinary lives of a middle-aged couple who have a complex, stubborn story together. Ira and Maggie are not easy to sympathize with, at least for this reader. I found Maggie irritating and her chatter quite distatessful, and Ira a cryptic man whom I never really managed to descipher. Their children, now grown up, are quite a disappointment, particularly the elder boy, Jesse, who has divorced his young wife without fighting to be in the life of his daughter. The real storyline takes place in Maggie's head where she tries to bring his son and estranged daughter-in-law together, failing as she did when she first managed to get them married due to an accidental pregnancy. I couldn't finish the book fast enough. I found the writing tiresome and the plot more than predictable. The characters lacked depth and I felt myself growing tired of their petty tribulations. If you want a profound and unsettling story of a marriage, please, read Salter's "Light Years and skip this novel.