Drifting through memories

No major writer takes as many risks while simultaneously appearing to play safe as apple pie, as the American domestic realist and artist supreme, Anne Tyler, does time and again. She has perfected a shrewdly but kindly formula that takes the reader into the world of the US sit-com Baltimore-style, as populated by bickering families and self-absorbed misfits adrift in sprawlingly attractive homes. Yet, she also explores the essential, life-shattering profundity of the banal. She is a cosy entertainer but also a moral philosopher - quite a double act. Above all, her touch whether comic, wry or tragic, is as subtle as goose down. Back When We Were Grownups, her 15th novel and the first since the publication of one of her finest. A Patchwork Planet three years age, draws on a familiar Tyler theme, that of life-chances missed.

"Once upon a time," she begins, "there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person." Even as early as this first sentence it is patently obvious Tyler is not about to offer us a fairy tale. Nor is Rebecca a conventional stepmother. Long since transformed into " by her husband's nickname-obsessed family, she is 53, jolly, already a fat grandmother given to "a loose and colorful style of dress edging dangerously close to Bag Lady" and is, apparently, the resident clan cheer leader as well as head of the family's professional party organising business.

It is Beck who eases all strife, quells the frequent tantrums and works hard at making sure everybody has as good a time as possible considering the almost uniformly cantankerous temperaments of adult characters with names as odd as Patch and NoNo, not forgetting an ancient uncle soon to hit 100 years of age and known as Poppy. So skilful a writer is Tyler that, within a sentence, the reader knows that Rebecca has arrived at a point of no return - a fact of which Rebecca is equally aware.Her strait-jacketed state is brilliantly implied within the opening scene, another reluctant, tension-packed family get together, this time to celebrate the engagement of one of Beck's three stepdaughters to a divorced man few of them like. It is a picnic party. "The Davitches' cars circled the meadow like covered wagons braced for attack." It is a wonderful image, particularly as Rebecca is, from the outset, presented as some kind of peace-loving squaw ever prepared to compromise herself in the interest of what passes for collective happiness.

So intent is she on spreading good will, she pursues the fleeing child of her soon-to-be-son-in-law. The distressed boy lands in the river and his rescue by Beck is slightly clouded by her dread of what will be said when the others discover she was the cause of his falling in the water.

The story, and with it the family history unfurls, perhaps too conveniently, as Beck visits her memories. But Beck is not a fool. Her marriage to the attractive, if hardly heroic, Joe was the first impulsive act of what appeared to have been destined to be a very cautious life of study. Beck, always overweight, was once a serious history student safely caught up in a dull though undemanding relationship with Will, even more studious and even more predictable. A chance invitation to a party organised by an earlier generation of Davitch party organisers results in Rebecca meeting Joe. He decided she was the girl having more fun than anyone else in the room. The notion of appearing happy charms her sufficiently that within weeks she has abandoned the boring Will to wed a divorced father-of-three she barely knows.

Reality has suddenly hit her and she relives her strange early and subsequent life, an existence dominated by Joe and his family. Eventually she gives birth, another daughter for Joe. All is well in a half-lilt sort of way, until six years into the marriage Joe, who never really seemed fully present, dies. As a study of drifting through life, this slight narrative succeeds in making its random mix of memory, which is recalled against the backdrop of everyday events and demands, flow with the awful ease of the inevitable.

When Rebecca suddenly realises she has spent more years living with her dead husband's old uncle than she did with him and that her own daughter, Min Foo, is as much one of her stepdaughters as she is her own, it causes the reader to swallow with some pain as well. It is too easy in a Tyler novel to find yourself one minute wondering how could any group of people be so horribly selfish and the next realising you actually know these characters.

Having spent her life saying things she thinks others want to hear she now knows she has become a stranger to herself. All of this self-examination is going on while Beck is also conducting life as usual. In one of several superb sequences, she faces an anxious mother who, having ordered a graduation party for her daughter, has just learnt the girl failed her exams and will not be graduating after all. Rather than have the party cancelled, Rebecca gamely persuades the mother to go ahead with it "to show how much you love her."

Elsewhere she hears herself recommending the garage services of Aldo, a man known for bragging about his beautiful wife who makes rugs and with whom he learns ballroom dancing. Their marriage is ideal, this is a man who loves his wife. It seems about as sentimental as Tyler, who may be folksy but is never mawkish and then the bomb drops, Aldo's perfect wife suffers from delusions and is drug-dependent as well as jealous. Convinced Aldo was cheating on her, she once arrived on the porch of another woman's house armed with a souvenir Japanese sword.

The comic touches are there; the porch and of course, the souvenir Japanese sword - but the message is as dark as Rebecca's dilemma. Marginally less black are the antics of Biddy, her neurotic stepdaughter, an ambitious chef obsessively creating ambitious food no one can stomach. Tyler's use of metaphor and symbol is invariably deceptively clever.

Beck's increasing self-reflection causes her to contact Will. More than 30 years have passed. He is now a professor at the college they once studied at and is divorced. A limp romance develops. Again Tyler handles it with an insight bordering on genius - as ever, her characters tend to live in the present while hanging on to the past. They may be brutal but she never is. Her honest vision shapes rather than cossets this novel. True, Rebecca is the glue and at times the reader is left wondering how so many grownups can be so disastrous.

Flashes of intelligence are evident in some of the children, but Tyler does not labour it. Back When We Were Grownups does not approach the quality of Earthly Possessions (1977), The Accidental Tourist (1985), Breathing Lessons (1988) or A Patchwork Planet, but Tyler, of the fresh, efficient, almost conversational prose, sharp dialogue and all too human truth, really is one of the wisest and perceptive observers crafting fiction as life.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times