Library Director’s Notebook
August 2012
A new book by Anne Tyler is always a treat, not just because her writing is superbly tender and absurdly funny, but because she is not the kind of writer who churns out a new book or two every year. Fans of Anne Tyler need to wait at least a few years between books, but the results are worth the wait.
In The Beginner’s Goodbye, Tyler returns to familiar, but never-tapped-out terrain, the inner musings and bemusement of a basically decent, middle class, at times rather clueless protagonist, living in the Baltimore area, who finds him or herself washed up on an emotional desert island. In this case the castaway is 30-something Aaron, an editor of a family owned self publishing firm, whose older wife Dorothy has recently died.
Aaron has spent a good deal of his life learning to live with a childhood disability that left him with only limited use of his right arm and leg. Although this has never stopped him from being mobile, working, dating, or marrying, Aaron has had to deal with the expectations of many of his family, co-workers, and friends who vacillate between smothering him with kindness and concern or treating him as if he were invisible. Or perhaps those friends and family simply don’t know what it is Aaron wants from them, since Aaron himself, as part of his own protective camouflage, has kept himself tightly coiled and too easily offended by the most innocuous of helpful gestures ,such as the offer of a batch of home-baked cookies.
Soon after her death, Aaron’s wife Dorothy starts to pop up in the most unlikely of places, like the produce section of a local market. Aaron can feel her palpably, can sense the heat as she displaces the air about he. He even believes that others see her, although they won’t acknowledge her; yet he seems to have no power to make her appear, or stay, or to engage her in any lengthy discourse. Dorothy makes some cryptic remarks that leave Aaron uneasy, not just about their brief, uneventful marriage but about his whole life and every relationship in it. He especially begins to look at his bossy ,unmarried sister Nandina in a different way, slowly changing his usual knee-jerk reaction of resistance and annoyance to a more nuanced and perhaps more appreciative one.
A series of vanity titles published by Aaron’s press all have the word “Beginner’s” in them; such as the Beginner’s Book of Dog Training or The Beginner’s Spice Cabinet. This series is the meat and potatoes of their publishing backlist and seems to be capable of spinning off titles ad infinitum. As he slowly examines his own sense of loss and his own inadequacies, Aaron begins to feel he might qualify as the creator of his own beginner’s guide: something that might one day be called The Beginner’s Guide to Love, Loss, and Starting Again.
