Ordinary People

Anne Tyler "is not merely good, she is wickedly good," John Updike has written. It's the kind of blurb that publicists wish upon a star for, and, in fact, it often sequins the flaps and covers of Tyler's fifteen novels. Updike's words always take me aback. Not that I don't think Tyler is extremely good—furtively, sometimes wincingly good. No, I trip over that " wickedly. " It implies a stylistic brashness and a certain oh-so-Updikean lubricity, neither of which traits remotely gilds her outlook. We're talking Anne Tyler here, not Anne Rice. The truth is that Tyler's body of work may have less to do with the body, the erotic, than that of any other major American writer today. Her plainsong prose is so well made—not to mention popular in a Hallmark Hall of Fame kind of way—that it doesn't quite register with the dressed-in-black literati. One doesn't go to ...