|
|
 |
•
more reviews on BOOKS page two |
| |
Back When We Were Grownups
By Anne Tyler '61. Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 274 pages, $25.
|
 |
Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned
into the wrong person.” So begins Anne Tyler’s fifteenth
novel, Back When We Were Grownups. But don’t be tricked by the
fairy-tale tone: This once-upon-a-time adventure neither veers toward
the fantastic nor preaches a moral code. Rather, Back When We Were
Grownups chronicles fifty-three-year-old Rebecca Davitch’s flirtation
with the tempting and often destructive what-if line of questioning
that can lead to mid-life crisis or worse. What if I hadn’t married
Joe Davitch, she wonders. What if I hadn’t thrown over my high-school
sweetheart? Where would I be today? More importantly, who might I
have been?
If the unexamined life isn’t worth living, must it
be true that the unlived life isn’t worth examining? Though a
widow, on paper Rebecca has it all—a roof over her head, a loving
family, her own business, and a gaggle of grandchildren. But scratch
the surface and the plaster falls in chunks from the ceiling, her
family is a tag-team of stepchildren and in-laws, and business is
touch and go.
When she dreams of traveling on a train with a tall teenage
son she never had, Rebecca is taken back thirty years, to a fork in
the road she decides sealed her fate and ripped her from a predictable,
organized life to the messy, neurotic world of the Davitches: the
day she shed her life as a small-town girl, engaged-to-be-engaged
to the tow-headed Will Allenby, and dashed into a short but sweet
marriage to the dark and handsome Joe Davitch, thirteen years her
senior. Suddenly, the only child found herself a full-fledged member
of a moody, unruly family and the stepmother of three little girls.
Rebecca did her part to lend a hand in the family business
of hosting parties on the ground floor of the Davitches’ Baltimore
row house. To her own surprise, Rebecca, a tentative bride, became
the telephone person, fielding calls from clients and phoning the
liquor vendors and handymen; she was better suited to the party business
than the Davitches themselves. Just before Joe’s untimely death,
she had her own daughter, Minerva, nicknamed “Min Foo” for
her fringe of dark hair and squinty eyes. All the Davitches had nicknames—Biddy
for Elizabeth, Patch for Patricia, NoNo for Eleanor. In fact, when
Rebecca joins the family, she’s christened “Beck.”
The Davitches’ penchant for nicknames is just one
of many indicators Rebecca misreads. Instead of recognizing the unconscious
welcoming the nickname implies, Rebecca latches onto “Beck”
as evidence of having forked the wrong way. The woman she’s become,
she decides—a roly-poly, cheerful grandmother who wears baggy
clothes and throws parties for a living, God forbid!—would be
unrecognizable to the old Rebecca.
The search for the old Rebecca provides Tyler both a convenient
roadmap and the occasion for romantic tension and humor. With Rebecca’s
selective memory hard at work, we’re led to believe the old Rebecca
was the more inspiring and intellectual. She cut a regal swath, she
remembers, wearing her flaxen braids pinned to the top of her head
and working long quiet hours in the library with young Will. In an
attempt to connect with her roots, Rebecca takes a short visit home,
where her mother, a finicky woman who regards the Davitch clan with
haughty skepticism, insists that Will—not Joe—was her soul
mate: “The two of you had so much in common; you were so much
in love; you understood each other so well…. I used to say, ‘It’s
just as if they knew each other from some previous incarnation. They’re
both such old, wise souls.’ ” Coming from a mother with
an outlook so narrow and judgment off the mark, one wonders why Rebecca
doesn’t drop the idea to search out old Will in the first place.
But curiosity overcomes her, and Rebecca finds Will teaching
at his alma mater, where she had left him three decades before. (Rebecca
fails to notice that this, too, might be a bad sign.) Her knack for
accommodating anyone and everyone allows her to put up with Will’s
obvious shortcomings for far too long.
Interestingly, it is just this talent that she herself
reviles: It’s not the haphazard dream of a teenage son that shifts
her focus to the unlived life, but the feeling that she is playing
a role instead of living. “It seemed she was constantly mustering
enthusiasm for her family’s engagements and weddings and births,
their children’s straight A’s and starring roles and graduations.
Sometimes, for lack of any other reason, she proposed a toast to Thursday.
‘To Thursday once again, and so many of us together! To good
food and good talk, and lovely summer weather!’”
But Rebecca is clever, quick on her feet, and not at all
the superficial ringleader she imagines herself to be. Instead, she
greases the wheels at parties, both professional gatherings and—more
importantly—Davitch family get-togethers. With gliding charm,
she avoids the pitfalls of hosting parties, never coming across as
aggressive, obtuse, interfering, or annoying. It’s no surprise
that Joe’s wise brother claims she saved the family business.
One might go so far as to say that after Joe rescued her from the
“ingrown, muted, stagnant, engaged-to-be-engaged routine,”
she turned around and saved the Davitches. An unfounded fear that
Joe had married her for her usefulness dissolves as Rebecca learns
to revel in her well-deserved pride.
As is always the case with an Anne Tyler novel, Back When
We Were Grownups unfolds gently and is a breeze to follow. One might
even make the mistake of thinking the book was as easily written as
it is read. But the careful reader will notice spikes of shrewdness
and suggestion, and respect Tyler’s risks. Look at the unwieldy
Davitch crew. In less adept hands, introducing and sustaining interest
in the twenty-odd characters would prove impossible.
But Tyler manages to use the cast to reflect the sensation
of being plunked down in the middle of a sprawling family. Together,
the Davitches are worthy of a collective Oscar for best supporting
actor. That’s no mean feat. Fittingly, this book is already a
blockbuster. —Katherine Guckenberger
Guckenberger '93, former fiction editor of The
Atlantic Monthly's online journal Atlantic Unbound, is a case writer
for the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
|
| |
|
