=Books Recently Read=

Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler. Even though she won a Pulitzer Prize (in 1989 for "Breathing Lessons" and was a finalist several times more), I always feel as if reading Anne Tyler is a guilty pleasure. I mean, she's no Virginia Woolf, certainly no William S. Burroughs; she's not even Anita Brookner. What she is exactly it's hard to say. She's easy to read, for one thing. Her characters are engaging, often unpredictable, and therefore usually endearing. She's a  popular author who writes serious books that aren't too serious for the general reader, featuring ordinary people who, upon closer examination, are just like us only because they are so quirkily unlike anyone else. She plays against cliche even while using cliche's, isn't afraid of schmaltz and sentimentality, although she constantly undercuts what is often dangerously close to a cloying fatty sweetness with an astringent twist of reality.

In "Saint Maybe," she tells the story of the Bedloe family from Baltimore; in particular, it's the story of Ian Bedloe, a teenager who decides it's time his older brother opens his eyes and stops playing the fool. Danny has married a woman who already has two kids from a previous marriage and, doing the math, the latest baby she's had is probably not his either. But Danny is so in love with Lucy that he refuses to see that things in his marriage don't add up; that Lucy is taking advantage of his trust and good nature, that she's sleeping around behind his back. 

Ian can see all this clear as day and he feels it his duty to tell his brother. Danny doesn't take it well; in fact, he steers his car straight into a wall so that he doesn't have to take it at all. Shortly thereafter, Lucy also comes to a premature end. With her death the three kids left behind have run out of parents, out of relations altogether, as far as anyone can tell, except for the Bedloes. Ian feels responsible. Though he has just entered college, he decides that he must drop out to help his aging parents raise the orphaned kids. This is a decision he makes after walking passed a storefront ministry called The Church of the Second Chance. He drops in on a whim and there encounters the Church's unconventional pastor who preaches a form of redemption that depends not simply on passively asking God for forgiveness, but by making tangible amends for your sins and thereby forgiving yourself.  

So Ian decides to devote his life to raising these kids he feels he essentially orphaned by opening his mouth in the first place. What's worse, he's not even sure anymore if he was right about Lucy. She was a sketchy sort of person to be sure, but was she really unfaithful to Danny? Somehow his certainty has vanished.

Tyler spins out the story from there. The children grow up and Ian grows older. He regrets his decision to give up his one-and- only life for the sake of three kids not his own and at the same time he can't think of any other life that would have been so rewarding. 
He becomes a carpenter. He continues going to the Church of the Second Chance. He never moves out of his parents house. And, in the end, just when you think you're running out of book and Ian is running out of time, he gets a second chance to start his own life.

Anyone who's ever tried to plot a narrative has to admire the way Tyler plots her novels.  She moves you through the years and between characters with such deftness that you're all but completely aware of the machinations behind the curtain. And then there is her unaffected writing style, as in the passage below, prose so unadorned, so lucid, and so precise that you feel as if you're looking at a world brought suddenly and sharply into focus through a new pair of prescription glasses:

"The evening was several shades darker now, as if curtain after curtain had fallen in his absence. Thomas was swinging the swing hard enough to make the chains creak, and down on the sidewalk the little girls were still playing hopscotch. Ian paused to watch them. Something about the purposeful planting of small shoes within chalked squares tugged at him...Daphne tossed the pebble she used as a marker and it landed in the farthest square so crisply, so ringingly, that the sound seemed thrown back from a sky no higher than a ceiling, cupping all of Waverly Street just a few feet overhead." 

Well, she may be the literary equivalent of a box of chocolate truffles and I may feel slightly guilty reading her instead of, say, William T. Vollmann or W.G. Sebald but, hey, a girl has to surrender to indulgence once in a while.