FictionAnne Tyler has been called a latter-day Jane Austen. She paints on a small canvas - Baltimore, Maryland, to be precise, where the author herself lives - and her territory is the suburban hinterland.
Her characters can verge on the quirky - think of Muriel, the ditzy dog trainer in The Accidental Tourist - lending a tone of whimsy to her work. But there's a sombre air to The Amateur Marriage, her 16th novel, which presents as a domestic saga but develops into a resonant meditation on chance, intimacy and loss. And not a dog trainer in sight.
Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay meet in the war fever atmosphere of post-Pearl Harbour Baltimore. Wounded in training, Michael never makes it to the front, and returns home with a limp, his only wound of war. The couple marry and join the manicured, suburban set of 1950s America - ranch-style homes, guitar-shaped swimming pools, canasta parties. They struggle in their young marriage - Pauline flirts with the notion of an extra-marital affair as she cares for three young children. An impulsive character, she is infuriated by Michael's thoughtful steadiness, the very attribute that first attracted her to him. Michael feels harried by Pauline's quicksilvery disappointment. There are rows and fallings-out - and extravagant, sexually charged makings-up.
A theme common in Tyler's work is of family breakdown. Here the Anton family is haunted by an absence - that of their eldest daughter, Lindy, who runs away from home aged 17 and disappears into the counter- culture of 1960s San Francisco. The vacancy she leaves behind is a wound around which the Anton family recasts itself, often in unpredictable ways. A rebellious teenager, Lindy is, according to younger sister Karen, the "household's spark and colour". Yet in the absence of her mouthy sister, Karen wonders wistfully if perhaps their fractured family could now be happy. And Michael - exasperated by his eldest daughter's volatility when she was at home - nevertheless looks at his remaining desperate-to-be-well-behaved children and finds himself blaming them for being dull.
Tyler's narrative is a relay race, the seven ages of a marriage. Each successive chapter is handed from husband to wife, to their son and daughter, and back again. Tyler invites the reader in to witness (or perhaps to stand in for the missing Lindy) this mismatched couple as they grow older, if not wiser, together. Lindy, of course, reappears briefly, but only to deliver into Michael and Pauline's hands a grandson called Pagan, a child as silent as his mother was volatile, as sealed and seemingly self-contained as Michael. It is in the parenting of this second family that something shockingly banal happens between Michael and Pauline - a small shift in tone, a cross word too many - which finally unravels their fractious union. It is a scene of such emotional mastery that the reader must go back and read it several times to find out what's happened - as if the amnesia that affects participants in a heated row has somehow infected the reader too, so close have we come to this flawed couple.
Anne Tyler is a consummate writer - funny, human, wry. She is particularly good on children - the "silky little cream puff" of a child's hand, the "stiff-legged, buckle-backed" tantrum of a toddler. The pacing of The Amateur Marriage is superb - it manages to imply the long monotonous stretches in a marriage and the sharply delineated crisis points with equal grace. It takes real courage to chronicle a marriage that survives - as this one does in spirit, certainly - and make it humorous, heartbreaking and profound. Anne Tyler has done just that.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist. She also teaches on the creative writing programme at the University of Arkansas
The Amateur Marriage By Anne Tyler Chatto & Windus, 306pp. £16.99