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IrishPenJen (United Kingdom) (2011/07/19):
Description:
When Joe Davitch first saw Rebecca, it was at a party at the Davitch home - a crumbling nineteenth-century house in Baltimore where giving parties was the family business. Young Rebecca looked to Joe like the girl having more fun than anyone in the room and he wanted some of that happiness to spill over onto him, a 33-year-old divorce with three little girls. Swept away, Rebecca soon found herself mistress of 'The Open Arms', embracing not only this large spirited man and his extended family but expertly hosting endless parties in the ornate, high-ceilinged rooms where people pay to have family celebrations in style. But now, years after she has lost her husband in a car accident, Beck (as she is known to the Davitch clan) asks herself whether she is an impostor in her own life. Is she really this natural-born celebrator, joyous and outgoing? Can she always be there for Poppy, her almost 100-ear-old uncle-in-law who lives on the top floor, for stepdaughters - Biddy and NoNo and Patch and the husbands and fiances, as they come and go, and their children - and for her own daughter Min Foo, pregnant again? What would have happened if she'd married her blond college sweetheart, Will, back then when they were so young and so serious and so sure about everything? Can one ever recover the person one has left behind - and would one ever like them? With perfect pitch, Anne Tyler explores these unsettling questions of love and loss, of identity and family, moving with breathtaking assurance between heartbreak and hilarity, between tenderness and razor-sharp observation in a novel that we wish would never end.Review:
Tyler has made the interior landscape of contemporary domestic Baltimore absolutely her own. This, her 15th novel centres around Rebecca, and its opening sentence crystallizes its central preoccupation, a common Tylerian one: 'Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person'. Rebecca is fifty-three, a widow for many years, and the matriarch of a sprawling family of children, in-laws, cousins, all largely the legacy of her marriage. Suddenly she finds herself wondering what would have happened had she married her childhood sweetheart, Will, instead of the older man who'd swept her off her feet, married her, and shortly afterwards died. She re-examines the view others have of her as gregarious, happy, sociable and wonders if she hasn't by accident fallen into someone else's life, wonders whether it isn't too late to try out the other path. She even goes so far as to contact Will and initiate a relationship before realising, as her uncle-in-law says, ' Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be'. She has indeed grown into the life she is leading. Most of the scenes in the book centre around celebrations, whether those of Rebecca's family or the ones that take place in her house, hired by strangers for the occasion. It's a messy, sprawling existence punctuated by drama and crisis, and occasionally the sheer number of characters and their individual dilemmas can feel as overwhelming to the reader as they appear to be for Rebecca. But it's a novel of great compassion, quiet wisdom and, for many perhaps, a central dilemma that touches a nerve. (Kirkus UK) What the papers say:
'Inventive, funny and wise. Her fiction is magically alive to the quirks and coincidences of fate' - Guardian Author's Biography:
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964 whilst her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. In 1994, Tyler was nominated 'the greatest living novelist writing in English' by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
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