Summer Reading

Back When We Were Grownups: A Novel

Knopf, 279 pp., $25

I love Anne Tyler, and I'm not alone in that sentiment -- her novels have consistently been bestsellers. But more than that, they have been those rare deserving bestsellers -- honestly told, entertaining, full of engaging characters, and well written. Admittedly, it's a bit surprising that her novels do so well, because so many of them are about the disappointments of life, about how things rarely work out as we might have hoped or planned. Tyler refuses to offer the happy ending if it's not realistic, if it's unearned. That's not to say, however, that her novels are complete bummers. Her writing is so dead-on and beautifully detailed, and her characters so engaging, that even when her plots are not that satisfying, the experience of reading her novels remains a hard-to-match pleasure.

Rebecca Davitch, the protagonist of Tyler's 15th novel, Back When We Were Grownups, is a typical Tyler character -- a middle-aged woman who begins to question who she is and how she got that way. More than 30 years earlier, as a pudgy and awkward college girl, Rebecca was engaged to quiet and sweet Will Allenby, but while at another friend's engagement party in a 19th-century row house in Baltimore (Tyler's familiar fictional terrain), she met the owner of the house and host, Joe Davitch, an older divorcé with three little girls and a large family of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Quickly, and unexpectedly, she fell in love with Joe Davitch, leaving poor Will behind. The family business -- hosting parties in the large house they call The Open Arms -- became her business, and Joe's family became her family, and she and Joe even had a child of their own. But just seven years after they married, Joe died tragically in a car wreck, and Rebecca found herself a widow, and more importantly, the head of this large family. It was a role she took up without question; she didn't have any other choice, did she? So the years passed by, the children grew into adults, had children of their own, and the parties continued. Life went on.

But as the novel opens, Rebecca -- or Beck, as her family calls her -- is second-guessing the path her life took all those years back. Has she turned into the wrong person? She wonders, "might it be possible, after all, to return to that place where her life had forked and choose the other branch now? Even this late in the journey? Even after she had used up the branch she had first chosen?" It becomes Rebecca's quest to find the answer to these questions. Among other things, she hunts down Will Allenby, the boy she jilted so many years ago.

The novel is vintage Tyler -- full of wit, oddball characters, each finely crafted (especially Poppy, the 99-year-old cantankerous great uncle). And the setup here is fascinating: Haven't we all been haunted by "what if"s? In Rebecca, Tyler gives us a woman who is so haunted that she has the gumption to try to seek out and live that other "if."

Back When We Were Grownups, if not quite as powerful as Tyler's best novels (Searching for Caleb, Dinner at the Heartsick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist), is still the work of a master. Late in the novel, Poppy says to Beck, "Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best with what you've got." That's exactly what Tyler has been writing about for her entire, impressive career -- true lives, the ones people end up with, like it or not.