Ladder of Years. - book reviews

In her thirteenth novel, Ladder of Years, Anne Tyler continues to be our foremost poet of family life. Her eye and ear for the intimate textures of day-to-day parenthood, aunthood, mother-in-lawhood, and every conceivable kinship tie remain as sharp and reliable as ever.

There's a special sensibility that typifies Tyler fiction. The world of her books is as wondrously ordinary as her suburban Baltimore can be, and her talent for conjuring up everyday misadventures seems without limit. A wistfulness pervades much of her writing, and the banal dysfunctionalities of her imagined clans can at times unsettle readers. Yet her tough intelligence helps forestall any undue sentimentality; and her smiling, uncondescending irony makes her a supremely comic novelist. (The nostalgic title of her best-known book, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, is actually a joke: the fabled dinner never materializes.) It's as if the best of Jane Austen, Chekhov, and the Prague filmmakers of the 1960s were rolled into one.

One of the miracles of Tyler's art is her having fashioned a world in which there are no villains. Her generous cast of characters includes folks who are unpleasant or manipulative or rigid, though none are evil. There are neglectful parents, unappreciative spouses, cocky teen-agers--but no truly bad people. And yet, somehow, there's not a hint of the Pollyanna in her outlook. Moreover, almost everybody in her work is recognizably American--WASP American, at that, with few foreigners or other ethnics. Nevertheless, the biographical blurbs routinely mention Tyler's postgraduate work in Soviet studies, her onetime post as Duke University's Russian bibliographer, and her marriage to an Iranian psychiatrist. Clearly she is no American provincial, her art no cheerful celebration of things American. This is not Norman Rockwell; nor is it her fellow Baltimorean, moviemaker John Waters--neither Utopia nor grotesquerie. Her wise genius is that she makes us readers feel, "Yes, that's how life is."

Life in Ladder of Years takes an odd turn when its protagonist, Delia (for "Cordelia") Grinstead, on a summer's day with her family on a Delaware beach, acts on a sudden whim. Those minute domestic tensions have been mounting. Her smart, aloof physician husband doesn't take her very seriously, and she chances to find out a distasteful fact about their early courtship. Meanwhile her three nearly grown children blithely disregard her casual talk and parental counsel; and her two older sisters (she is a Cordelia, after all) beset her with their own idiosyncrasies. Her next of kin can't even recall the vital data about her physique and clothing (for opening lines of the novel, see, box).

And so, without premeditation or bitterness, Delia simply walks away from the shore, hitches a ride with a workman, and, equally randomly, gets off at a little town just a couple of hours outside Baltimore, name of Bay Borough.

There she finds a barebones room in a boarding house, lands a secretarial job at the town's only law office, takes her meals at a local diner, and eventually settles down as a housekeeper and caregiver for a sad school principal (abandoned by his own wife) and his spunky adolescent son. During the fourteen months spanned by the plot, Delia in her new incarnation will make lots of friends, and enjoy it all the more when her sisters, spouse, and children track her down yet make no special effort at winning her back to the fold.

With minimal experience outside of her home and suburb (her husband and she have lived in the very same house she'd grown up in), Delia now becomes the wide-eyed naif to whom things happen, and her little adventures on the road--or rather on the tiny Main Street--are many. The entire action is narrated from her viewpoint; in a kind of gentle picaresque, she encounters dozens of people of all ages and types, every one of them colorful and quite memorable. In the end, however, it is her motherly and wifely virtues that enable Delia to grow into a functioning, even fulfilled member of her adopted community.

Suddenly, just when she seems poised to consider new romantic and even familial ties, Delia receives word of her daughter's impending marriage, and so heads back to Baltimore for a day or two. Once there, she walks into a classic wedding crisis, but unprepossessingly takes charge, happens to meet an entire gallery of still newer folk, and--the inevitable--finds herself literally confronted with having to choose between her new life and her old. Delia's choice, and her reasons why, show Tyler's narrative sorcery at its best.

Just about every page of Ladder of Years contains bright, sparling dialogue and luminous, stray observations--as when Delia's latest acquaintance, a sexy, blonde TV weatherwoman, makes a sharp turn in her car and "brake[s] for a jaywalking collie." At one point, undecided as to whether to drop in at home for Christmas, Delia wonders, "Oh, why wasn't there an etiquette book for runaway wives?" Delia gives her pet cats sturdy men's names like "Vernon" and "George," which leads to some amusing confusion with a feline's human namesake. The title itself comes from the philosophical monologue of a feisty, sixty-seven-year-old retirement-home resident (and happy father of a newborn boy): "See, I've always pictured life as one of those ladders you find on playground sliding boards--a sort of ladder of years where you climb higher and higher, and then, oops!, you fall over the edge and others move up behind you." If you tote Ladder of Years to the beach this summer, you'll have good company and, most assuredly, won't want to walk away.

By mid-May, Ladder of Years was high on the New York Times best-seller list, sharing space with John Grisham and Robert James Waller. In the wasteland that American culture seems intent on becoming, Anne Tyler's subtle, humane craft stands as a necessary counter to the likes of them and what they stand for.

RELATED ARTICLE: BALTIMORE WOMAN DISAPPEARS DURING FAMILY VACATION

Delaware State Police announced early today that Cordelia F. Grinstead, 40, wife of a Roland Park physician, has been reported missing while on holiday with her family in Bethany Beach.

Mrs. Ginstead was last seen around noon this past Monday walking south along the stretch of sand between Bethany and Sea Colony....

A slender, small-boned woman with curly or light-brown hair, Mrs. Grinstead stands 5[feet]2[inches] or possibly 5[feet]5[inches] and weighs either 90 or 110 pounds. Her eyes are blue or gray or perhaps green, and her nose is mildly sunburned in addition to being freckled.

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