Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

For Michael and Pauline's 30th wedding anniversary, their family presents them with a framed picture: two black and white ovals of two very young people, set side-by-side, outlined in gilt. Daughter-in-law Sally explains: "It's you two just before you met."

Pauline is struck speechless. "That these two photos should document, coincidentally, almost the very last moment of their lives as separate people."

At the moment their lives coincided — impetuous Pauline has jumped off a tram to join an enlistment parade, hits her head and is taken to Michael's dour mother's grocery store to have her head bandaged and to fall in madly in love — so do the lives of those around them.

Their lives mirror the lives of many others in the Polish neighbourhood of Baltimore, and the other couples who came together in the feverish flush of wartime: they come together; fall apart.

Michael and Pauline meet in 1941, on Pearl Harbour Day, in a store of the type which, 60 years later when the novel ends, no longer exists. Michael's family store has been swallowed up by a chain called World O'Food.

Tyler documents a changing social history: from a tiny, cramped store in the Polish neighbourhood where the family live in equally cramped quarters above the shop through to (Pauline has nagged) the showcase subdivisions of the 1950s with shared swimming pools in the graceful blue guitar shape.

Pauline, who creates chaos in order to survive, loves it here: "So green and safe and peaceful, so structured, so beautifully organised!"

Michael does not quite fit in. He is the husband who doesn't know how to swim. "The one whose trunks seemed floppier, whose chest seemed whiter and somehow more exposed-looking than the other men's."

Neither of them knows how to swim, or not with any grace or ability, the long laps of married life.

Sometimes, Michael 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. Did other couples behave this way? They didn't seem to, at least from outside."

Michael thinks that all the couples started out on this race equal and in equal ignorance. "But that they grew up together, became wise and accomplished at marriage along the way. But he and Pauline remained, as inexperienced as ever, the last couple in the amateur's parade."

He does not know who to ask about such things. He has no friends, certainly no confidantes.

Michael has held himself apart: "Could it be true that he was cold and remote?"

Perhaps he has retreated into the silence of his shell as a response to all the noise Pauline makes. The more she demands, the less he wants.

Tyler excels at loneliness of the kind that accompanies a couple who are seldom apart.

They seldom meet in conversation on these pages. When they do, it is to bicker, to accuse, and then to turn aside.

"Wait, though," thinks Michael, "you could always say Pauline was his friend. She was closer to him than his own skin; she was the one who had freed him from his stunted, smothering boyhood."

This marriage, to Pauline, feels like "something spilled, something torn and bleeding and spilling out of its borders, like a sloppily fried egg".

It gives nothing away to say the marriage ends in one last dreary argument — an argument about all those other dreary arguments.

You long for this, as Michael longs for her to shut up and Pauline longs for him to say something.

But you also long for something more to be filled in. Emotionally this amateur marriage seems even more bereft than its subject matter demands. The peripheral characters remain peripheral: the missing daughter remains missing even when she reappears; the mysterious mute grandson adopted by Michael and Pauline becomes little more than a guitar-playing teenager who begins to talk but says little.

The Amateur Marriage may span 60 years, but for all that it feels too slender, too subdued a story to sustain such ambitious scope.

Chatto & Windus, $34.95