So real it reached out and bit me

books:


	• Breathing Lessons: A Novel Anne Tyler Ballantine Books, 2006 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 103 reviews view larger image
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Two for the Road

The more things change the more they stay the same. Maggie and Ira Moran are a 50ish couple, married back in the 1950's. Like all couples, they had their hopes and dreams, and many of them have come true, though not exactly as they had envisioned. Marriage is not a Doris Day movie, but the Morans are often as polarized as Doris and Rock ever were. She is a still a dreamer subject to pulling the wool over her own eyes, while he is a dyed in the wool pragmatist without an ounce of whimsy. Typically middle class, they have their 2 children, own a little house, and go of to their ordinary jobs each day. They bicker, hold their tongues, sleep in the same bed, cope with the outrageous demands of their extended families, and grapple with the potholes and rocks that life throws in their path. Like road rage. And being caught in flagrante (or in outrageous lies.) As the reader becomes engrossed in the 18 hour microcosm of their lives, it is easy to dismiss this couple as dysfunctional. But what they are, really, is functional. Not wildly successful, not always happy, far from perfect, but together, and reliably there for each other. Are they going to change? Not likely. But they are in this for the long hall, and that's what I believe this book is all about.

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Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons is a giant of a book, a giant because of the way in which it gently wraps you into its character's world and allows you to feel their lives being lived. It's a giant of a book in a very small world, a world inhabited by Maggie and her husband, Ira, and, it seems, by precious little else. They are long married, happy, perhaps without really knowing it, and replete with generally unacknowledged failure.

Breathing Lessons starts with Maggie picking up the family car after its repair job and spruce up. She immediately runs into a truck and doesn't stop. She and Ira then head off on a long drive to a funeral of a long lost friend. Memories revisit high school and adolescence as the widow attempts to recreate her wedding service to bid farewell to her husband. The songs her friends originally sang turn out to be highly inappropriate, depending on your point of view, and some don't want to try to recreate their youth and so become dignified spoil sports. Some old scores are re-tallied, none settled, of course.

Then Ira and Maggie set off home and decide to call in on their son's estranged wife and their granddaughter, a girl of seven, it turns out, they haven't seen since she was an infant. On the way there is a strange encounter with a fellow traveller. Maggie invents a story, for some reason, which he believes. She pursues the scam, is as duplicitous as hell and carries the whole thing off as if it had been gospel from the start. A strange episode.

Maggie is surprised that she does not recognise her granddaughter. Perhaps Anne Tyler is suggesting that the only really important things for Maggie are those she keeps within the confines of her head. Fiona, the estranged daughter-in-law, seems surprisingly accommodating, even more so when details emerge of how poorly treated she has been by Maggie and her son, Jesse. Maggie and Ira clearly weren't too good at being parents, or grandparents, either.

Maggie convinces herself that she can get the separated couple back together and cajoles her daughter-in-law and granddaughter to motor back to Baltimore with them She phones her son and arranges for him to call round later that day, after the travellers have reached the family home. It seems that everyone except Maggie is both indifferent and sceptical, but, for some reason, everyone goes along with her suggestions. And, of course, it all goes nowhere. None of these folk, by the way, could be described as intellectual. Not one of them ever seems to have read a book or, indeed, ever suffered the trauma of a moment of self-reflection since birth. All anyone ever does is react, and then usually wrongly.

Maggie is the book's central and essential character. Ira, her husband, for the most part busies himself driving, playing solitaire or teaching Frisbee. But basically he seems to hover around the edge of Maggie's universe, occasionally putting his foot in it by pointing out the odd reality here and there, realities that Maggie expends massive resources trying to ignore or deny. She makes mistakes. She crashes the car every time she drives (two out of two in the book). She constantly imagines herself as God's gift, a sort of Mrs Fix-It for everyone else's problems. But she is singularly unable to organise her own existence. She is overweight and yet over-eats. She is full of self-justification, almost invariably based on obviously false premises. And she seems to have developed absolutely no powers of self-analysis or reflection, even when reality occasionally forces its way into her existence to contradict her assumptions and undermine her intentions.

I have to admit that I tried to start the book at least three times without success. For me, Maggie's character was just not quite credible and, if it were credible, I could find no reason why I would want to read about such a person. I persevered this time, however, and the result was a rewarding insight into an uncultured and eventually valueless approach to life that, I suspect, Anne Tyler suspects may be widespread, though I feel that she would not be as judgmental about it as myself.

In the end, all of the characters in Breathing Lessons are failures, who consistently render their own lives a chaotic mess, both inside and outside their heads. They are surrounded by their own mistakes and missed opportunities. These are people who really work at their incompetence and succeed brilliantly. I can't help feeling that at least one of them, in the normal run of things, would display an intellect superior to a demented parrot and a facility for self-reflection greater than a sooty fireback. But no one ever does. Perhaps that's the point.

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So real it reached out and bit me

The greatest thing about this book, and the most difficult to write, is all the dialogue is so convincing and natural, you begin to feel this could be your own family. Anne Tyler actually writes it the way someone would speak and not the way someone would think, very difficult, indeed, and most masterfully done, in creating and generating an understanding of each character through what they say, and in some cases, don't say. A great read.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Maggie and Ira Moran have been married for twenty-eight years?and it shows: in their quarrels, in their routines, in their ability to tolerate with affection each other?s eccentricities. Maggie, a kooky, lovable meddler and an irrepressible optimist, wants nothing more than to fix her son?s broken marriage. Ira is infuriatingly practical, a man ?who should have married Ann Landers.? And what begins as a day trip to a funeral becomes an adventure in the unexpected. As Maggie and Ira navigate the riotous twists and turns, they intersect with an assorted cast of eccentrics?and rediscover the magic of the road called life and the joy of having somebody next to you to share the ride . . . bumps and all.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

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