Back When We Were Grownups

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 30, 2001 | by Gabriella Boston

Sometimes an obsession with what could have been -- prompted by the perpetual "what if?" question -- prevents us from enjoying what is. This is the quandary facing "Beck" Davitch in Back When We Were Grownups (Knopf, $25, 273 pp), the latest novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Tyler.

Beck has lived a life devoted to others, whether it was her late husband, Joe, her own daughter, her three stepdaughters or a slew of grandchildren. She spends her days either accommodating their needs or the needs of her business, a catering service she runs out of her ornate but crumbling Baltimore row house.

In this setting, peopled with the self-absorbed relatives who rarely give her the gratitude she deserves, Beck starts wondering if she has made the right choices in life. When she was young, she was shy, quiet and bookish. At 53, she is an outgoing, full-time caregiver and loud-when-necessary party host. Does Beck like the person she has become? She's unsure.

Beck decides to reconnect with the woman she once was and contacts her college sweetheart, Will Allenby, now a recently divorced physics professor. Their first meetings are disastrous, but she keeps pursuing the relationship, a move that readers may find difficult to understand, since Will seems somewhat dull. He eats homemade chili every day of the week and questions the American phobia toward boredom. "I don't require newness just for newness' sake," Will says. But you wish he did.

Awkward exchanges such as this and comic relief are constants in the novel. There is the tragicomical Biddy, one of Beck's stepdaughters, a caterer who is too creative for her own good -- and for her customers' taste. Then there is Minerva, "Min Foo," Beck's daughter who has been married three times and has as many children by different fathers.

The quirkiest character is 99-year-old Poppy Davitch, Beck's step-great-uncle with whom she lives. The sweet-toothed old man's every pocket rustles with candy wherever he goes. "Evidently he feared being caught in some emergency situation with no source of sweets," Tyler writes. And when at an outing Poppy complains of chest pains and is rushed to the hospital, it turns out that he simply is suffering from indigestion brought on by too many cupcakes.

Beck's travels down the road of self-discovery and self-improvement are realistically restricted. She does not shed her excess pounds to become a lighter self or read her literary subscriptions to become the intellectual she longs to be. In fact, Beck never becomes the character the reader wants her to be, an improved person who in middle age conquers all her fears and shortcomings. Rather, Tyler tells it much like it is, offering Beck's story as a slice of life that has no defined beginning or end -- but that could have been adequately dealt with in a short story.

For all its honesty, humor and unpretentiousness, Back When We Were Grownups lacks depth. Many areas of Beck's personality remain untouched, such as how she has managed and maintained her relative happiness without much care and tenderness from anyone since her husband's death two decades earlier. Still, this is an entertaining tale of a very recognizable woman and her search for her true self -- most likely the person she already is.