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The Semi-Miracle of Time
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20104 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
4,698 Words |
| Author
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Joseph Voelker
Joseph Voelker teaches English at Franklin and Marshall
College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Art
and the Accidental in Anne Tyler, published by the University
of Missouri Press in 1989. |
Behind the deft exercises in the craft of storytelling in Anne Tyler's novels, behind her design of scenes, her juggling of point of view, lurk the traces of a meticulously detailed timeline that she may have actually constructed and hung on her study wall prior to composing the prose. We can imagine it as a big chart that resembles the ones they used to put on the inside covers of high school history textbooks. "The March of Progress" they were called, or, "America Through the Ages." The traces of that chart in her fiction intimate that Tyler conceives of her work as analogous to that of the historian. She is the recording angel of imaginary families.
Certain events on Tyler's timelines have a pluperfect quality; often, they occur before the narrative proper even begins. In Searching for Caleb, for instance, there is the Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1912 when Caleb Peck wandered away from home. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, it is the Sunday afternoon in the summer of' 44 when Beck Tull drove the family to field to play with an archery set. In Accidental Tourist, it is the summer night (apparently in 1984) when Ethan Leary wandered into a holdup in a Burger Bonanza. And in Saint Maybe, it is that Saturday night in late March of '65, when a horny, angry Ian Bedloe told his brother, Danny, that his wife, Lucy, was unfaithful.
It is less accurate o say that everything in Tyler's characters' subsequent lives is caused by these pluperfect events than to say that it somehow dates from them. A novelist, Tyler is reticent to dispense justice, to attribute responsibility, to accuse too many events in her cosmos may have been innocent mistakes or random accidents. People disappear or die; their survivors struggle vainly to construct chains of causation, to get at some final "why."
For Tyler, the novel has better things to do than to seek out the cause. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ezra Tull pauses in reading his mother's diary to note the past's refractoriness: "How plot less real life was! In novels, events led up to something. In his mother's diaries, they flitted past with no apparent direction." Macon Leary makes a kindred observation on the final page of Accidental Tourist: "The real adventure is the flow of time; it's as much adventure a anyone could wish."
Actually, Tyler has recommended this reticent brand of realism in her role as critic. In a 1975 review of fiction by Larry Woiwode, she wrote: "The plot … is almost non-existent, but when you reach the end you realize that enormous events
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