Ladder of Years. - book reviews

National Review, June 26, 1995 by James Bowman

IF ANNE Tyler has a fault, it is a tendency to cuteness. Usually this is kept in check by a clear-sighted view of the pain that lies just over the horizon for her placid and decent Middle American characters. But in Ladder of Years she is like Delia Grinstead, her middle-aged heroine, who is tempted by a good-looking young man she meets in a supermarket: she flirts shamelessly with cuteness without ever quite committing herself to an affair.

But, like Delia too, she goes right to the brink. Nowhere but in an Anne Tyler novel could there be a town called Bay Borough, Maryland, with a plaque in the square saying: ``On This Spot, In August 1863, George Pendle Bay, A Union Soldier Encamped Overnight With His Company, Dreamed That A Mighty Angel Appeared To Him And Said, 'Ye Are Sitting In The Barber's Chair Of Infinity' Which He Interpreted As Instruction To Absent Himself From The Remainder Of The War And Stay On To Found This Township.'' When Delia, fed up with being taken for granted, walks out on her husband and three grown children, we know Bay Borough is the place for her. Likewise, we know what it means when she sees a classified ad in the newspaper (called, cutely, the Bugle) for someone to help a single father w/lively, bright, engaging 12-yr-old son. Must be willing to wake boy in A.M., serve breakfast, see off to school, do light cleaning/errands/shopping, assist w/homework, provide transportation to dentist/doctor/grandfather/playmates, attend athletic meets & cheer appropriate team, host groups of 11 - 13 yr olds, cook supper, show enthusiasm for TV sports programs/computer games/paperback war novels, be available nights for bad dreams/illness. Such an ad could appear only in an Anne Tyler novel, and it could be answered only by an Anne Tyler heroine. The irony of her leaving her own family in order to accept paid employment with someone else's is not lost upon Delia. Moreover, the man who placed the ad, Mr. Miller, needs a new mother for his son, Noah, because his wife left him. One day she found a lump on her breast. ``In the time that I have left to me,'' she told her husband, ``I want to make the very best of my life. I want to do exactly what I've dreamed of.'' So she became a TV weather lady. The lump turned out to be benign. This part of the story, too, has the patented Anne Tyler cuteness, but it has the virtue of being functional, since it adds another dimension to the theme of women who leave their homes. Ellie, the weather lady, becomes Delia's double and says things that sound just like her: ``I'm not myself these days. You hear people say that all the time, but up till now I'd assumed it was a figure of speech. Now I stand off to one side looking at myself like a whole other person, and I ask, 'What could she be thinking of?''' When she tries to explain why it is that she left her husband, she says, ``I started picturing how I'd get to Heaven and God would say, 'Such a waste; I sent you into the world and you didn't even make use of it, just sat there in one spot complaining you were bored.' So I walked out.'' It is one of Anne Tyler's great virtues as a novelist that she does not judge her characters, but even Anne Tyler, I'm afraid, is not up to the task of convincing us that leaving a husband and son to become a TV weather lady and thus to justify one's existence in the eyes of God is the act of anything but a deeply silly woman. And Ellie's silliness reflects back badly on Delia, who otherwise would stand a better chance of winning our sympathy for her own desertion. In the end, the novel suffers fatally from the fact that her desertion is really the only interesting thing about her. It is not enough. With her husband, Sam, with Mr. Miller, and even with the young man in the supermarket, she is always ready to receive the impression of some more dominant personality, and act a wifely part. The fact that her family is not even sure what color her eyes are is meant to be an indication of their coldness and lack of interest in her, but their indifference is partly the product of her own indefiniteness. Like so many of Miss Tyler's characters, there is an elusive quality to Delia, a sense that she will forever be looking for the character she means to enact, rather than, like most of us, enacting it. This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, and it is to Delia's credit that she has a certain sense of irony and self-detachment. When she cashes her first paycheck in Bay Borough -- the first paycheck of her life, really -- ``She carried her head high and set her feet down with precision. She might have been the heroine in some play or movie. And her intended audience, of course, was Sam.'' But not enough is made of this self-awareness, and her inner life is too random and unfocused. It is all right to have a merely instinctive heroine, but then the author has to show us what the heroine's own thoughts and words are incapable of showing. We know, for instance, that Delia reads a book a day -- many classics, some trashy romances. But she might be reading the newspaper or the Bible or the Marquis de Sade -- or filing her nails -- for all the impression that they make on her. She left home partly because one week's messages on her answering machine could as easily have been another's; but even in her supposed independence she slips back into old routines, finding herself a year later at the same beach reading the same novel as she was when she walked out on Sam. This would be fine if the intention were satirical, but Anne Tyler is not a satirist. Her specialty is compassion and understanding, and in her greatest novels these qualities are displayed on something like a heroic scale. But in Ladder of Years they are stretched too thin. Delia sits up in bed late one night listening to jazz on the radio. Lots of lonesome clarinets and plinkety-plonk pianos, and after every piece the announcer stated the place it was recorded and the date. A New York bar on an August night in 1955. A hotel in Chicago, New Year's Eve, 1949. Delia wondered how humans could bear to live in a world where the passage of time held so much power. They can bear it because they have to bear it. It's the ``human'' condition. And, by the way, Delia's one too. If you are going to try to evoke pathos, you should try it with something a little more specific than the universal lot of mankind. Otherwise you fall into glibness and sentimentality and, well, cuteness. It's like feeling sorry for someone because she has only ten fingers and ten toes. Anne Tyler has been seduced by her own generosity of spirit into taking on too banal a subject, unworthy of her powers. But her powers are still great, and they make even this book never less than readable.