Say hello to Tyler's 'Goodbye'
When you pick up a novel by Anne Tyler, you can expect certain things. It will be set in Baltimore. It will follow families populated by out-of-step characters ranging from the slightly odd to the wildly eccentric, whose actions, or non-actions, are motivated by a need for love and tangible sense of self. This need is sometimes conscious, sometimes not, and it will be a pleasure to read.
“The Beginner’s Goodbye,” Tyler’s 19th novel, features all of these things and more — there is a ghost — and less. Just over 200 pages, it is, both in literal weight and narrative complexity, lighter than most of the Tyler canon. In many ways, “Goodbye” feels like the center slice of an Anne Tyler novel, a distillation of all the ghosts and dislocations, of all the miscast but still loving families, tin-eared marriages and baffling children, of all the sudden tragedies that cause even the most plodding horse to rear up and take flight, finding grace and strength he had forgotten he had.
The plodding horse/eccentric main character here is Aaron Woolcott, whom Tyler has endowed with symbolism both physical — a childhood fever left him with a crippled arm and leg and a stammer — and professional. Aaron works at the vanity press his great-grandfather established, publishing, among other things, a series of books aimed at beginners: “The Beginner’s Guide to Wine,” “The Beginner’s Book of Dog Training.”
“The Beginner’s Goodbye” confines itself to months, specifically the months following the death of Aaron’s wife, Dorothy. The two are in the middle of an ordinary marital moment — Aaron comes home early from work with a cold, the two have a small quarrel over care-taking and the location of the Triscuits — when a tree falls on the house, inflicting wounds on Dorothy from which she eventually dies and wounds on Aaron from which he eventually learns how to live.
It’s classic Tyler, replete with references to crab feasts and Reisterstown Road, with characters who have dug themselves so deep into their emotional caves that they don’t realize how small the space is and how dark, until an avalanche removes the back wall.
