The Amateur Marriage: A Novel by Anne Tyler (English) Paperback Book

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The Amateur Marriage

by Anne Tyler

From the inimitable Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Breathing Lessons" comes a rich and compelling novel--a "New York Times" bestseller--about a mismatched marriage, and its consequences spanning three generations.

FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New

Publisher Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author—a rich and compelling novel about a mismatched marriage and its consequences, spanning three generations

They seemed like the perfect couple—young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother's grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.

Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable.

From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more fully into the complex entanglements of family life in this wise, embracing, and deeply perceptive novel.

Author Biography

ANNE TYLER was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the author of more than twenty novels. Her twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. Her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Review

"An ode to the complexities of familial love, the centripetal and centrifugal forces that keep families together and send their members flying apart, the supremely ordinary pleasures and frustrations of middle-class American life."
--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Tyler ranges over 60 years of American experience… from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the anniversary of that day in 2001…as she tracks one couple's domestic disturbances…[Her] writing is beautifully accurate, more often than not with a glinting vein of humor."
–William H. Pritchard, New York Times Book Review, front cover

"She evokes the entire sweep of [a marriage] with uncommon delicacy & dignity… gives us the feeling of being inside Michael and Pauline Anton's marriage."
–John Freeman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"She traces the stormy union of two people who love but can't stand each other."
–Kirkus Reviews

"This 'wickedly good' author has come to represent the best of today's American literature… She is an exquisite chronicler of the everyday
…Her characters are at once infuriating and endearing, conservative yet quietly eccentric."
–Lisa Allardice, The Observer, London

"Her command of what will move a story forward & engross a reader is faultless."
–Martha Southgate, Baltimore Sun

"She expertly explores the perils of marriage… Wise & observant…She has the uncanny ability to expose the most confusing contradictions of love." –Connie Ogle, Miami Herald

"In the fervor of WWII, Michael and Pauline rush head-long into marriage, then live in a constant state of turmoil …We watch safely from a distance like a busybody neighbor hiding behind the curtains, judgmental yet fascinated."
–Kim Askew, Elle magazine

Review Quote

"An ode to the complexities of familial love, the centripetal and centrifugal forces that keep families together and send their members flying apart, the supremely ordinary pleasures and frustrations of middle-class American life." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times "Tyler ranges over 60 years of American experience… from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the anniversary of that day in 2001…as she tracks one couple's domestic disturbances…[Her] writing is beautifully accurate, more often than not with a glinting vein of humor." William H. Pritchard, New York Times Book Review, front cover "She evokes the entire sweep of [a marriage] with uncommon delicacy & dignity… gives us the feeling of being inside Michael and Pauline Anton's marriage." John Freeman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch "She traces the stormy union of two people who love but can't stand each other." Kirkus Reviews "This 'wickedly good' author has come to represent the best of today's American literature… She is an exquisite chronicler of the everyday …Her characters are at once infuriating and endearing, conservative yet quietly eccentric." Lisa Allardice, The Observer, London "Her command of what will move a story forward & engross a reader is faultless." Martha Southgate, Baltimore Sun "She expertly explores the perils of marriage… Wise & observant…She has the uncanny ability to expose the most confusing contradictions of love." Connie Ogle, Miami Herald "In the fervor of WWII, Michael and Pauline rush head-long into marriage, then live in a constant state of turmoil …We watch safely from a distance like a busybody neighbor hiding behind the curtains, judgmental yet fascinated." Kim Askew, Elle magazine From the Hardcover edition.

Discussion Question for Reading Group Guide

1. What is noticeable about the narrative voice in the first chapter? At the end of the chapter the narrator states, "They were such a perfect couple. They were taking their very first steps on the amazing journey of marriage, and wonderful adventures were about to unfold in front of them" (p. 34). Whose voice is this meant to be? Why is the chapter called "Common Knowledge"? 2. How does the presence of Mrs. Anton affect Michael and Pauline''s marriage? What has made Mrs. Anton so dependent on her son? Is Michael unfair to Pauline in expecting her to care for his mother? Who is Michael more obligated to--his mother or his wife? 3. How is Pauline''s flirtation with Alex Barrow related to the letters she sent Michael while he was away in the army (pp. 54-55)? What does the reader learn about her character in the chapter called "The Anxiety Committee"? Would someone like Alex Barrow have been a better choice for Pauline? What goes through her mind as she sits downstairs alone? Why does she decide not to go out and meet him that night? 4. In its early chapters, The Amateur Marriage gives readers a view of life in an ethnic working-class neighborhood in Baltimore. Later, the setting shifts to a newly built suburb, where the family gradually moves into the middle class. What are the effects of this shift on the family? How does Anton''s experience reflect a change in American family life in the postwar decades? 5. Michael thinks of Pauline as "a frantic, impossible woman, so unstable, even in good moods, with her exultant voice and glittery eyes, her dangerous excitement" (p. 167). Meanwhile Pauline "chafed daily at . . . his rigidity, his caution, his literal-mindedness . . . his reluctance to spend money, his suspicion of anything unfamiliar, his tendency to pass judgment . . . [and] his magical ability to make her seem hysterical" (p. 75). Does the narrative present us with a more positive view of Michael or of Pauline? Who is the more sympathetic character? 6. Pauline enters Michael''s life in a vivid red coat, bleeding because she jumped impulsively from a streetcar to join a parade (pp. 3-5). Does the report of her death in a car accident years later (pp. 275-76) imply that Pauline hasn''t changed? Why does Tyler frame Pauline''s presence in the novel with two accidents? 7. As he posed in the photography studio for a fifteenth-anniversary portrait with Pauline, Michael remembers thinking, "Who was this woman? What did she have to do with him? How could they be expected to share a house, rear children together, combine their separate lives for all time? The knob of her shoulder pressing into his armpit had felt like an inanimate object" (p. 137). The photograph shows "Mr. and Mrs. Perfectly Fine. . . . An advertisement for marriage" (p. 137). Are these thoughts an indication that, for Michael at least, the marriage is doomed? How does this photograph relate to the double portrait described on p. 172? What distinction is Tyler making between the public and private aspects of married life? 8. Reflecting on his marriage, Michael imagines that "all those young marrieds of the war years" have grown "wise and seasoned and comfortable in their roles, until only he and Pauline remained, as inexperienced as ever--the last couple left in the amateurs'' parade" (p. 168). He felt they were "more like brother and sister than husband and wife. This constant elbowing and competing, jockeying for position, glorying in I-told-you-so" (p. 168). How common are the problems that Michael and Pauline experience in their relationship? Is Michael correct in thinking that he and Pauline are unusual in their long-standing "amateur marriage"? 9. Do Michael and Pauline handle their trip to San Francisco well or badly? Why do they take Pagan home without pursuing their attempt to bring Lindy home as well? Why do they never go back and try again? Does the episode suggest that they are both fundamentally passive and ineffectual people? Or does it suggest, on the other hand, that they are realistic and know how to protect themselves from grief? 10. How is the narrative organized, and how do the chapters handle the flow of time? What is achieved in the structure that Tyler has chosen for this novel? Does the narrative point of view tend to illuminate the thoughts of all characters equally? If not, into which characters are we are given more insight and access? 11. In what ways does Tyler distinguish herself from other contemporary novelists you have read? Look closely at a few favorite passages and discuss how she achieves the effects of style, humor, and insight that make her work so enjoyable. 12. "Time," Anne Tyler has said, "has always been a central obsession of mine--what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own."* Does Michael''s decision to leave the marriage after thirty years, and his careful courtship of Anna, reveal a desire to redeem lost time? How is his relationship with Anna different from his first marriage? Why doesn''t Pauline remarry? 13. How surprising is the reappearance of Lindy? Why has Lindy never tried to contact Pagan before this? Is her return to the story satisfying or not? 14. To Lindy, the family was like "an animal caught in a trap. . . . Just the five of us in this wretched, tangled knot, inward-turned, stunted, like a trapped fox chewing its own leg off" (p. 300). Does Tyler suggest that such a feeling is natural when people feel alienated from their families or misunderstood by them? What might Michael and Pauline have done differently? Is their helplessness in the face of Lindy''s unhappiness their own fault, or does the novel suggest that there is a limit to what parents can feel responsible for? 15. How are George and Karen affected in their development by the disappearance of Lindy and by their parents'' troubled marriage? Does Tyler suggest that children become themselves in spite of, or in reaction to, family stresses? 16. Anne Tyler has said, "My fondest hope for any of my novels is that readers will feel, after finishing it, that for a while they have actually stepped inside another person''s life and come to feel related to that person."* Does The Amateur Marriage achieve this goal? *Interview with Anne Tyler,

Excerpt from Book

1. Common Knowledge Anyone in the neighborhood could tell you how Michael and Pauline first met. It happened on a Monday afternoon early in December of 1941. St. Cassian was its usual poky self that day--a street of narrow East Baltimore row houses, carefully kept little homes intermingled with shops no bigger than small parlors. The Golka twins, identically kerchiefed, compared cake rouges through the window of Sweda''s Drugs. Mrs. Pozniak stepped out of the hardware store with a tiny brown paper bag that jingled. Mr. Kostka''s Model-B Ford puttered past, followed by a stranger''s sleekly swishing Chrysler Airstream and then by Ernie Moskowicz on the butcher''s battered delivery bike. In Anton''s Grocery--a dim, cram-packed cubbyhole with an L-shaped wooden counter and shelves that reached the low ceiling--Michael''s mother wrapped two tins of peas for Mrs. Brunek. She tied them up tightly and handed them over without a smile, without a "Come back soon" or a "Nice to see you." (Mrs. Anton had had a hard life.) One of Mrs. Brunek''s boys--Carl? Paul? Peter? they all looked so much alike--pressed his nose to the glass of the penny-candy display. A floorboard creaked near the cereals, but that was just the bones of the elderly building settling deeper into the ground. Michael was shelving Woodbury''s soap bars behind the longer, left-hand section of the counter. He was twenty at the time, a tall young man in ill-fitting clothes, his hair very black and cut too short, his face a shade too thin, with that dark kind of whiskers that always showed no matter how often he shaved. He was stacking the soap in a pyramid, a base of five topped by four, topped by three . . . although his mother had announced, more than once, that she preferred a more compact, less creative arrangement. Then, tinkle, tinkle! and wham! and what seemed at first glance a torrent of young women exploded through the door. They brought a gust of cold air with them and the smell of auto exhaust. "Help us!" Wanda Bryk shrilled. Her best friend, Katie Vilna, had her arm around an unfamiliar girl in a red coat, and another girl pressed a handkerchief to the red-coated girl''s right temple. "She''s been hurt! She needs first aid!" Wanda cried. Michael stopped his shelving. Mrs. Brunek clapped a hand to her cheek, and Carl or Paul or Peter drew in a whistle of a breath. But Mrs. Anton did not so much as blink. "Why bring her here?" she asked. "Take her to the drugstore." "The drugstore''s closed," Katie told her. "Closed?" "It says so on the door. Mr. Sweda''s joined the Coast Guard." "He''s done what?" The girl in the red coat was very pretty, despite the trickle of blood running past one ear. She was taller than the two neighborhood girls but slender, more slightly built, with a leafy cap of dark-blond hair and an upper lip that rose in two little points so sharp they might have been drawn with a pen. Michael came out from behind the counter to take a closer look at her. "What happened?" he asked her--only her, gazing at her intently. "Get her a Band-Aid! Get iodine!" Wanda Bryk commanded. She had gone through grade school with Michael. She seemed to feel she could boss him around. The girl said, "I jumped off a streetcar." Her voice was low and husky, a shock after Wanda''s thin vio- lin notes. Her eyes were the purple-blue color of pansies. Michael swallowed. "A parade''s begun on Dubrowski Street," Katie was telling the others. "All six of the Szapp boys are enlisting, haven''t you heard? And a couple of their friends besides. They''ve got this banner--''Watch out, Japs! Here come the Szapps!''--and everyone''s seeing them off. They''ve gathered such a crowd that the traffic can''t hardly get through. So Pauline here--she was heading home from work; places are closing early--what does she do? Jumps off a speeding streetcar to join in." The streetcar couldn''t have been speeding all that fast, if traffic was clogged, but nobody pointed that out. Mrs. Brunek gave a sympathetic murmur. Carl or Paul or Peter said, "Can I go, Mama? Can I? Can I go watch the parade?" "I just thought we should try and support our boys," Pauline told Michael. He swallowed again. He said, "Well, of course." "You''re not going to help our boys any knocking yourself silly," the girl with the handkerchief said. From her tolerant tone, you could see that she and Pauline were friends, although she was less attractive--a brown-haired girl with a calm expression and eyebrows so long and level that she seemed lacking in emotion. "We think she hit her head against a lamppost," Wanda said, "but nobody could be sure in all the fuss. She landed in our laps, just about, with Anna here a ways behind her. I said, ''Jeepers! Are you okay?'' Well, somebody had to do something; we couldn''t just let her bleed to death. Don''t you people have Band-Aids?" "This place is not a pharmacy," Mrs. Anton said. And then, pursuing an obvious connection, "Whatever got into Nick Sweda? He must be thirty-five if he''s a day!" Michael, meanwhile, had turned away from Pauline to join his mother behind the counter--the shorter, end section of the counter where the cash register stood. He bent down, briefly disappeared, and emerged with a cigar box. "Bandages," he explained. Not Band-Aids, but old-fashioned cotton batting rolled in dark-blue tissue the exact shade of Pauline''s eyes, and a spool of white adhesive tape, and an oxblood-colored bottle of iodine. Wanda stepped forward to take them; but no, Michael unrolled the cotton himself and tore a wad from one corner. He soaked the wad with iodine and came back to stand in front of Pauline. "Let me see," he said. There was a reverent, alert silence, as if everyone understood that this moment was significant--even the girl with the handkerchief, the one Wanda had called Anna, although Anna could not have known that Michael Anton was ordinarily the most reserved boy in the parish. She removed the handkerchief from Pauline''s temple. Michael pried away a petal of Pauline''s hair and started dabbing with the cotton wad. Pauline held very still. The wound, it seemed, was a two-inch red line, long but not deep, already closing. "Ah," Mrs. Brunek said. "No need for stitches." "We can''t be sure of that!" Wanda cried, unwilling to let go of the drama. But Michael said, "She''ll be fine," and he tore off a new wad of cotton. He plastered it to Pauline''s temple with a crisscross of adhesive tape. Now she looked like a fight victim in a comic strip. As if she knew that, she laughed. It turned out she had a dimple in each cheek. "Thanks very much," she told him. "Come and watch the parade with us." He said, "All right." Just that easily. "Can I come too?" the Brunek boy asked. "Can I, Mama? Please?" Mrs. Brunek said, "Ssh." "But who will help with the store?" Mrs. Anton asked Michael. As if he hadn''t heard her, he turned to take his jacket from the coat tree in the corner. It was a schoolboy kind of jacket--a big, rough plaid in shades of gray and charcoal. He shrugged himself into it, leaving it unbuttoned. "Ready?" he asked the girls. The others watched after him--his mother and Mrs. Brunek, and Carl or Paul or Peter, and little old Miss Pelowski, who chanced to be approaching just as Michael and the four girls came barreling out the door. "What . . . ?" Miss Pelowski asked. "What on earth . . . ? Where . . . ?" Michael didn''t even slow down. He was halfway up the block now, with three girls trailing him and a fourth one at his side. She clung to the crook of his left arm and skimmed along next to him in her brilliant red coat. Even then, Miss Pelowski said later, she had known that he was a goner. "Parade" was too formal a word, really, for the commotion on Dubrowski Street. It was true that several dozen young men were walking down the center of the pavement, but they were still in civilian clothes and they made no attempt to keep in step. The older of John Piazy''s sons wore John''s sailor cap from the Great War. Another boy, name unknown, had flung a regulation Army blanket around his shoulders like a cape. It was a shabby, straggly, unkempt little regiment, their faces chapped, their noses running in the cold. Even so, people were enthusiastic. They waved homemade signs and American flags and the front page of the Baltimore Sun. They cheered at speeches--any speeches, any rousing phrases shouted over their heads. "You''ll be home by New Year''s, boys!" a man in earmuffs called, and "New Year''s Day! Hurray!" zigzagged through the crowd. When Michael Anton showed up with four girls, everybody assumed he was enlisting too. "Go get ''em, Michael!" someone shouted. Though John Piazy''s wife said, "Ah, no. It would be the death of his mother, poor soul, with all she''s had to suffer." One of the four girls, the one in red, asked, "Will you be going, Michael?" An outsider, she was, but very easy on the eyes. The red of her coat brought out the natural glow of her skin, and a bandage on her temple made her look madcap and rakish. No wonder Michael gave her a long, considering stare before he spoke. "Well," he said finally, and then he kind of hitched up his shoulders. "Well, naturally I will be!" he said. A ragged cheer rang out from everyone standing nearby, and another of the girls--Wanda Bryk, in fact--pushed him forward until he had merged with the young men in the street. Leo Kazmerow walked on his

Details ISBN0345470613 Author Anne Tyler Short Title AMATEUR MARRIAGE Language English ISBN-10 0345470613 ISBN-13 9780345470614 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY FIC Year 2004 Imprint Ballantine Books Inc. Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Alternative 9780736697231 Birth 1941 Residence Baltimore, MD, US DOI 10.1604/9780345470614 Subtitle A Novel AU Release Date 2004-10-26 NZ Release Date 2004-10-26 US Release Date 2004-10-26 UK Release Date 2004-10-26 Pages 320 Publisher Random House USA Inc Publication Date 2004-10-26 Audience General

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TheNile_Item_ID:7161970;
  • Condition: Brand new
  • ISBN-13: 9780345470614
  • ISBN: 9780345470614
  • Publication Year: 2004
  • Format: Paperback
  • Language: English
  • Book Title: The Amateur Marriage: a Novel
  • Item Height: 203mm
  • Author: Anne Tyler
  • Publisher: Random House USA Inc
  • Topic: Books
  • Item Width: 132mm
  • Item Weight: 227g
  • Number of Pages: 320 Pages

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