The Nature of Things

Micah Mortimer, aka the Tech Hermit, may know a lot about computers, but he doesn't know beans about relationships. Especially relationships with women. When his woman friend (he refuses to think of a woman in her thirties as a "girlfriend") of three years tells him that she is afraid that she is going to lose her apartment and be homeless, he jokes that at least she has her own car to sleep in.  Shortly thereafter she comes to his apartment and finds that he has invited the son of one of his college sweethearts to sleep on his daybed. A person with any insight might have intuited at that point that there was a chilling of the atmosphere, but when she later breaks up with him, declaring the relationship over, he is totally surprised. And about that son of his college sweetheart, he had turned up on Micah's doorstep, after an estrangement from his mother and stepfather, declaring that Micah is his father. But since Micah never had sex with the young man's mother, h...

I loved Willa Drake, the protagonist in Anne Tyler's latest book, Clock Dance . I confess I totally identified with her, which, of course, means she is perfect in every way. And she is perfectly drawn by the author. We first meet Willa at age eleven. She is the older of two daughters. Her sister is six. Her father is the stolid, dependable parent. Her mother is the drama queen, often making theatrical exits from the family whenever she's feeling unappreciated or misunderstood. She always comes back eventually, but her unpredictability marks the lives of her children forever and makes Willa vow that she will be a good mother, "which to her meant a predictable mother," Tyler writes. Willa grows up in Pennsylvania, eventually goes off to college in the midwest, cuts short her education for an early marriage to a native Californian and moves to California where they raise their two sons. Then, when her first husband dies as a result of his own road rage bullying, she lat...

Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler My rating: 5 of 5 stars The retelling of classics by modern authors seems to be all the rage in the literary world these days, witness the Austen Project from which I have now read three books . This book is part of another such project, the Hogarth Shakespeare Series . It launched in 2015 and this is the third book to be released in the series. I am perhaps an even bigger fan of Anne Tyler than I am of Shakespeare - and I really do like the Bard - so the prospect of the two combined was completely irresistible to me. Anyway, I generally try to read Anne Tyler books pretty much immediately after they are published and so I pounced on this one, and, boy, am I glad I did! It's a hoot! This is a retelling of The   Taming the Shrew . There have been countless adaptations of this story of the stubborn woman who rebels against society's expectations of her. I remember well seeing the old movie, Kiss Me Kate , starring Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson, that ...

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler My rating: 5 of 5 stars I loved this book. I can't think of any Anne Tyler book I've ever read - and I think I've read them all - that I haven't enjoyed, but this one seemed special to me. Most likely the professional critics would not rank it among Tyler's best work such as Breathing Lessons , Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant , and The Accidental Tourist , but for me it was a profoundly moving read, perhaps because I identified strongly with one of the characters. My enjoyment could also have had something to do with my personal history. As a new college graduate many years ago, the first job that I landed was in Baltimore. I packed my bags and went there knowing absolutely no one who lived there and just the basic facts about the city. My employer recommended a local family who had a room to rent. I could live there until I managed to get myself sorted out. So, I moved into this row house in a middle-class neighborhood and ro...

If it's Anne Tyler, we must be in Baltimore again.   This time she introduces us to a family publishing company, a small concern that mostly publishes vanity books. It has a line of "self-improvement" books called "The Beginner's..." which covers everything from cooking to you-name-it. One of the editors at the company is Aaron, the scion of the family. Aaron has a crippled right arm and leg and has had to deal with an older sister who feels the need to protect him and manage his life. Nandina is unmarried and lives in the family home. Aaron is married to Dorothy, a doctor who is very independent and outspoken. She is a plain, somewhat dumpy woman who is not interested in physical appearance or taking pains to make herself attractive. She is also not interested in taking care of Aaron or managing his life. Aaron adores her and they have a relatively happy marriage. Then one day, the unthinkable happens. Aaron and Dorothy are at home together and they have a ...

In Anna Karenina , Leo Tolstoy famously wrote that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." All of Anne Tyler's families are different and that is certainly true of the Tull family that we meet in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant . We meet the family initially as its irascible matriarch, Pearl Tull, lies dying at age 85. Caught between life and death, she is beset by memories and by regrets. She struggles to tell Ezra, her favorite son, that he should have had an alternate mother, but she is unable to form the words. Her memories take her back to the time, some 30 years before, when her husband, Beck Tull, deserted her, leaving her to raise their three children on her own. Beck was a traveling salesman and his children were used to him being away from home, so none of them noticed any difference at first. Their mother refused to tell them they had been deserted. She pretended - for years! - that he was just on another business trip....