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The book opens by explaining that everyone knew how Pauline and Michael got together. The year is 1941, and young men in the United States are being invited to enlist in the army or navy. But Michael, aged 20, works in his parents’ grocery store. His mother was widowed some years earlier, and his brother died of a degenerative disease, so Michael is her only support.
Michael is tall, gangly and somewhat shy. Then Pauline walks into the store with some of her friends, and her forehead is bleeding. Michael not only leaps to the rescue with some first aid, but goes out with the girls to watch a military parade, almost forgetting about his mother. He is smitten. And when it becomes apparent that Pauline expects him to enlist too, he does…
Their marriage happens fairly quickly, as was so often the case in the war years. Michael is wounded and released from service, and when he proposes, Pauline doesn’t feel she can refuse although she keeps wondering if she did the right thing. And this is, perhaps, a preview of the next thirty years. Pauline is generous, kind and very impetuous. She also gets muddled at times, forgetting what she’s doing or where she’s going. Michael is purposeful, reserved and logical. We would possibly say, today, that he’s on the autistic spectrum.
The couple have three children: Lindy, George and Karen. Lindy is rebellious and independent. George is stolid and reliable. Karen is a person of strong opinions who is independent without rebelling. And they grow up in an atmosphere that alternates anger and peace, love and apparent hatred, and the inconsistencies inherent between two such different parents.
The book is set over a period of about sixty years, each chapter leaping ahead but making it clear where the story is fairly quickly. Pauline and Michael never do really get the hang of marriage - hence the title of the book - although they realise that their friends may well be going through similar ups and downs.
It’s a generational saga in 300 pages which I found quite readable, though not gripping. I quite liked Pauline so was shocked at something that happened ‘off set’, so to speak, prior to one of the final chapters. I found Michael mostly incomprehensible in his rigidity. Karen is an interesting person but when she moves out we don’t hear much of her. And Lindy is an unknown quantity whose actions early in the book overshadow almost everything that happens in the rest of it.
As I’ve come to expect from Anne Tyler, the writing is impeccable, the people observed with sufficient empathy to make them realistic, and some caricatured quirks to make them memorable. The author manages to turn everyday activities and disagreements into readable, interesting fiction despite the lack of any real storyline. And even the ending, which I found somewhat disappointing and inconclusive, still kept me reading, even though I realised that probably nothing more was going to happen.
I suppose it’s a satire on family life - particularly American family life of that generation and culture - and as such it works pretty well although I don’t suppose I’ll remember it a year from now, let alone another eighteen. I don’t think I’d recommend ‘The Amateur Marriage’ as an introduction to Anne Tyler, unless you’re a fan of this kind of anecdote-based novel without any real story. But it’s not a bad book, and if you do like this kind of easy reading with a little bit of a bite here and there, it may be worth trying.
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