Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler is a guilty pleasure for me - her books are such easy reads that surely something's wrong with them. I started some years ago - the first I really remember is Ladder of Years, about a woman who walks away from her family during a trip to the beach, goes to the next town, and sets herself up: a rented room, a job, a routine. From that distance she communicates with her bewildered husband and children. I liked it because what mom hasn't enjoyed the fantasy of just leaving, pulling the rug from beneath her family's expectations of her? Imagine the family car suddenly having a mind of its own, and instead of schlepping on errands, taking off for parts unknown just for the change.

Then I read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and began to know Tyler's milieu - the eccentric (which means off-center) characters who bumble through life trying to be fair, trying to understand a world that fails them, trying to reconcile their own histories with who they think they should be.

Tonight I finished Digging to America, a rumination on what America is, what makes a person American, and the nature of outsiders. Two Korean baby girls arrive on the same flight to Baltimore's airport, each met by her adoptive family. Because the Americans are loud and inclusive, they pull the Iranians into association which becomes friendship. The two extended families are full of ideas about each other, assigning cultural attributes based on peeping through this window onto others' lives. They're often comical, sometimes offensive (and offended), but as their lives intertwine they become just people, close in the way family members are: a source of irritation, but like a grove of bamboo, connected underground.

Tyler's a best-selling author, which suggests that eccentricity is a refuge for many readers: a place to contemplate and make peace with our own oddities, and to come away more tolerant of others' foibles. Much light fiction is escapist: science fiction, spy stories, steampunk, vampires, a school for wizards, mysteries in which we can read at a happy distance about someone else's fatal problems. But she writes another kind of novel: reflective, in which rather than forgetting our own lives in favor of those more glamorous and dangerous, we find the poetry and humor in ourselves. And appreciate ourselves more, as she exalts failings by showing the humanity and compassion that precipitate them. Her characters may not be swashbucklers, but by their own measure they dare, and sometimes succeed. And she is kind: the highest achievement in her books is the growth and recognition of love.

If I were teaching high school English, she'd be on my reading list. Her characters don't outgrow oddity, they learn to flourish within it - surely that would be a comfort to a fifteen-year-old who's pretty sure no one understands.

Writing: Good Endings

Coming up with a good ending for a short story or novel is either a fluid mindless process, when the subconscious provides one, or just about impossible, if the writer has to think it through then frame it in words that don't seem labored.

A great ending elevates the story - it's worth the effort to get it right. My current favorite is Samuel Beckett's "Dante and the Lobster" (in the collections "More Pricks than Kicks" and "I Can't Go On, I'll Go On") - read it! The story provides hilarious and vivid imagery as the reader makes the rounds of his day with the protagonist. All seems in keeping with the grim view he takes of life and his techniques for prolonging it with agonized ritual, including the funniest bit about toast I've ever read.
Then, the final sentence: "It is not."
In three words Beckett demolishes the reader's comfort and amusement.
It's shocking, it's profound. It makes you wonder "How did he do that?" and "Can I ever possibly do that?"

The best endings I've written have showed up in the wee hours, when part of my brain is conscious but the rest zoned out, and my subconscious has free rein to neatly wrap things up. But if I have to do more than tweak that final image, I'm doomed. It won't cooperate. Writing ten or twenty alternate endings doesn't seem to get me any closer.

Some people write from an outline, so they know going in, more-or-less how a story will end. Do they feel an inspirational thrill when they get there? Does the ending write itself, or was it already there, and the function of the story is to reach the point where it comes next?

I enjoy being amazed by my characters - their resilience, their senses of humor, their understanding in the face of disaster that there is a Next. And when we get to the end of a story, they help me bring all the loose ends together - there's something magical about it. I type but they dictate.

Part of an effective ending is keeping the reader on the hook. In "Ladder of Years", Anne Tyler doesn't resolve her protagonist's dilemma until the final page - you can't put down the novel if you care about her at all. But when a book fizzles and you don't get there, it's frustrating. Brian Hall's "I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company" about Lewis and Clark's expedition, goes on and on after the leaders return from westward exploration. I stopped reading with about fifty pages left - whether they lived happy or miserable lives afterwards didn't matter to me.

A good ending is the height of aesthetics, providing a summation of the story's conflicts and a direction the protagonist will go. When well done, this shifts the reader from the circumstances at hand to the universals beneath. When we're given a good ending we feel we've gained by reading the story - and when it's unsatisfying, we have that urge to hurl the book across the room - "I read all those pages for THAT!?"