The Amateur Marriage: A Novel - Softcover

Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage is not so much a novel as a really long argument. Michael is a good boy from a Polish neighbourhood in Baltmore; Pauline is a harum-scarum, bright-cheeked girl who blows into Michael's family's grocery store at the outset of World War II. She appears with a bloodied brow, supported by a gaggle of girlfriends. Michael patches her up, and neither of them are ever the same. Well, not the same as they were before, but pretty much the same as everyone else. After the war, they live over the shop with Michael's mother until they've saved enough to move to the suburbs. There they remain with their three children, until the onset of the 60s, when their eldest daughter runs away to San Francisco. Their marriage survives for a while, finally crumbling in the 70s.

If this all sounds a tad generic, Tyler's case isn't helped by the characteristics she's given the two spouses. Him: repressed, censorious, quiet. Her: voluble, emotional, romantic. Mars, meet Venus. What marks this couple, though, and what makes them come alive, is their bitter, unproductive, tooth-and-nail fighting. Tyler is exploring the way that ordinary-seeming, prosperous people can survive in emotional poverty for years on end. She gets just right the tricks Michael and Pauline play on themselves in order to stay together: "How many times", Pauline asks herself, "when she was weary of dealing with Michael, had she forced herself to recall the way he'd looked that first day? The slant of his fine cheekbones, the firming of his lips as he pressed the adhesive tape in place on her forehead". Only in antogonism do Michael and Pauline find a way to express themselves. --Claire Dederer, Amazon.com

"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 Su"n
"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 thecurtains, judgmental yet fascinated."
-Kim Askew, "Elle" magazine

"From the Hardcover edition."