Maybe it’s unfair to acknowledge new books by Anne Tyler and Sue Miller in a single bow; after all, these novelists have very different voices and, ultimately, different concerns. But as two of the country’s best-loved practitioners of the literature of daily life, Tyler and Miller take pleasure in many of the same things - sandwich fixings and porch furniture, old houses and new marital revelations, dumbstruck adolescents and the sleepy affection of longtime lovers. Tyler (“Breathing Lessons,” “The Accidental Tourist”) works most easily on the surface, reaping everything she can from the ring and resonance of the ordinary, while Miller (“The Good Mother…… For Love”) burrows intently through the underground passages that connect her characters. Neither is in absolutely top form this time around, but that’s OK: second-tier efforts from these two are tantamount to most writers’ masterpieces.
Tyler’s _B_Ladder of Years b(326 pages. Knopf S24) describes the quiet rebellion of Delia, who married a doctor and raised three kids and is starting to wonder why she bothered. Her husband, Sam, patronizes her when he isn’t taking her for granted; and the kids 21,19 and 15 -treat her much the same way. When she disappears one summer day, they tell the police that she’s either 5'2" or maybe 5'5" and her eyes are blue or perhaps gray. Delia really has disappeared, though all she did was rent a room in a new town and find a job as a secretary. But the doctor’s wife and the kids’ mother is gone. She’s starting from scratch.
Tyler does a lovely job painting Delia’s entry into her new world, the way she buys plain dresses, not her usual baby-doll pink and blue, and resists furnishing her room with anything more than a lamp and an immersion coil. But too often, Tyler’s sense of humor undermines the story. She’s so witty-and convincing-about the utterly repressed Sam and the utterly self-absorbed kids, for instance, that it’s impossible to believe they exert any pull on Delia. Similarly, Tyler gives a bubblehead named Elbe a great line to deliver (“In a way, the whole marriage was kind of like the stages of mourning … Denial, anger…”) but is a bubblehead really the type to drop a reference to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross? “Ladder of Years” has chann galore, but it turns glib just often enough to hit a few wrong notes.
Miller’s _B_The Distinguished Guest b(282 pages. HarperCollins. $24) also suffers from a kind of glibness. Her skill at dissecting relationships is as well honed here as ever, but this story of a family in conflict with its past sometimes veers into prose so conscientiously beautiful that it brings the narrative to a dead halt. When Thomas, the gangly son who’s at ease only at the piano, starts playing Schumann amid a family crisis: “The music moved forward, the voices in it somehow gradually merging into a triumphant, yet grave, song, which burst forth once and then retreated… offering, somehow, a vision, musically, of a boundlessly wide and painful beauty.” It’s fine, but it’s a photo opportunity.
Miller tackles a lot in this novel, the tale of an elderly woman who has published a memoir and some stories drawing on her troubled life and become a late-blooming feminist heroine. Meanwhile, her children are still suffering wounds from their upbringing, wounds she never acknowledges. Miller traces the delicate fault lines that will lead to this family’s earthquake, and with her usual grace brings out tensions and traumas in all their complexity. Yet there’s something stately and overdressed about the world she has created here: it’s elaborate in the writing but skimpy in the flesh and blood. “The Distinguished Guest” may not bring hordes of new readers to Miller, but it should certainly keep her fans content until next time.
