The story charts the marriage of a couple who are such opposites in character but who fall madly in love. As the marriage progresses with children and moving out to the suburbs inevitably the cracks appear between a couple who are so fundamentally different. A beautifully observed book.
Anne Tyler is the ultimate writer’s writer and I join her throng of admirers, but she is very hard to emulate. I think that’s partly because she is so unflinchingly spare in her structuring – you can see that in The Amateur Marriage. You get the impression she is that rare creature: a great novelist without a big ego.
From the incomparable Anne Tyler, a rich and compelling novel, spanning three generations, about a mismatched marriage - and its consequences. Michael and Pauline seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment she walked into his mother's grocery store in Baltimore, he was smitten, and in the heat of World War II fervour, they marry in haste. From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayers of later years, Anne Tyler captures the nuances of everyday life with telling precision and sly humour.
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941 but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. This is Anne Tyler’s sixteenth novel; her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore. In 2012 Anne Tyler was the winner of the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence.
