The Amateur Marriage. Anne Tyler. Chatto & Windus. UK £16.99 “Anyone in the neighbourhood could tell you how Michael and Pauline first met.” Few recent novels can boast as perfect an opening line as Anne Tyler’s 16th. Not only does it promise a detailed, blow-by-blow account of the strangely qualified union of the title, but it also raises the reader’s curiosity about the kind of neighbourhood where the meeting of any two people, no matter what the outcome, could become a matter of public interest. However distant might seem in many ways, the predominately Polish neighbourhood of St Cassian’s, Baltimore on that December afternoon of 1941 is rendered almost irresistible by a writer for whom the simple is made to resonate. A Mrs Pozniak on the street carries “a tiny brown paper bag that jingled.” A Model-B Ford “puttered past”. Even the “tinkle, tinkle and wham” of a group of youngsters charging through the door of Anton’s Grocery helps to create a sound- and city-scape that demands the reader’s alert attention. Being so lovingly described, the implication is that all this cannot last. The meeting is in itself quite mundane. In the excitement of a post-Pearl Harbour army recruiting drive, a young girl sustains a small head-wound alighting from a streetcar. Escorting her to the only open store in town, young Michael Anton’s school friends literally walk her into his life. But it’s not just love or infatuation that draws young Michael out and away into the packed streets with their heady emotions. For up at the recruitment platform, like so many other young men carried away in the moment, he signs up. For the front? His mother can hardly believe it. “It seemed possible that she was picturing the front of a room or a piece of furniture.” When he’s home again not long afterwards, having been “accidentally” shot at camp, his mother’s gratitude at having him home and safe, albeit with a slight but permanent limp, never really banishes this reader’s lingering curiosity about the circumstances of his receiving that “million dollar wound” and his subsequent feelings about army life and thoughts on the war itself. Certainly, though Michael and Pauline quickly marry in the hasty style of the time, not all is well between them. Where Michael is cautious, a plodder one might say, the ambitious Pauline is “a floor pacer, a foot jiggler, a finger drummer.” Through sudden, heated arguments and even more heated makings-up, the marriage just about survives Pauline’s temptation to take a lover and Michael’s reluctant move from the run-down suburb of his childhood to a society house complete with blue, guitar-shaped pool. Somewhat more troubling is the relative ease with which it seems to survive the disappearance some years later of their now 17-year-old eldest girl Lindy who, inspired by the Beats, one day takes to the road. Her little sister might plausibly wonder if this will finally mean a calming of tensions within the household, but the absence of any real change in the behaviour of her parents is not so easily believed. As it happens, the next time Lindy shows up in person she’s forty years old, but by now her mother is three years dead and the novel, like the relationship it describes, has pretty much run its course. In fact, a far more interesting episode has come some twenty years earlier. Taken in by a commune after barely surviving the worst excesses the Haight-Ashbury counter-culture could offer, the young Lindy has her parents journey all the way to San Francisco only to fly back home the following day, still daughterless, but now with the new responsibility of an abandoned grandson to take care of. Wherever this virtual second chance at parenthood might lead in this progressively less hopeful book, it seems simply a mistake not to have treated it in far more detail. A sympathetic gesture towards what Tyler calls “all of those young married of the war years,” this is a book about loss and lost opportunities. When Michael and Pauline finally divorce, for example, his second marriage is to the girl partly responsible for their meeting in the first place. And yet for all the time spent in their company, in the 60 years between Pearl Harbour and 9/11,  the most memorable characters here are the ones only briefly glimpsed, the Polish community of shoppers and neighbours, butchers and pharmacists so beautifully conjured in the main story’s background, going about their everyday business in America’s promised land, their differences gradually being eroded and erased just as Anton’s down-at-hell grocery becomes, inevitably, yet another generic outlet in the World O’Food chain. (originally published in The Sunday Tribune) © Pat Boran

WB Yeats Siegfrid Sassoon William Shakespeare Ted Hughes Seamus Heaney Eavan Boland Paula Meehan Stephen King WH Auden Harry Potter JR Rowling Maeve Binchy