Breathing Lessons
Anne Tyler
1988

Introduction

A highly regarded author of short stories and novels, Anne Tyler is known for her fiction that explores the vicissitudes of human existence in late twentieth-century America. Tyler's readers readily identify with her complex characters and see their own experiences mirrored in her fiction. She often makes her readers laugh out loud, but she also makes them think—about life, loss, family, death, and all aspects of the human condition.

Breathing Lessons is Tyler's eleventh book. Winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for fiction as well as Time magazine's Book of the Year, it is the story of the "run-of-the-mill marriage" of Ira and Maggie Moran. The story explores the joys and tribulations of marriage, as Maggie and Ira travel from Baltimore to a funeral and home in one day.

Author Biography

On October, 25, 1941, Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her parents were members of the Society of Friends and liberal activists, and the family lived in a series of Quaker communes across the Midwest and South of the United States. Anne read voraciously as a child and began write stories at the age of seven. When she was eleven, the family moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where she attended public school for the first time. The alienation she experienced at that time became a recurring theme in her writing.

Tyler attended Duke University on academic scholarship. During her time there, she studied creative writing and Russian. Although she wrote simply for "something to do," she received the Anne Flexner award for creative writing twice. Her short stories were published throughout her college years. At nineteen, Tyler graduated from Duke after three years, with a B.A. in Russian.

In 1961, after a year of graduate studies at Columbia University, Tyler returned to Duke. There, she worked as a Russian language bibliographer until 1963. She married and moved to Montreal, Quebec, where her husband studied medicine. While there, she worked as an assistant librarian and wrote her first and second novels, Morning Ever Comes (1964) and The Tin Can Tree (1965).

In 1967 Tyler and her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland. Once the girls were in school, Tyler began writing full time. In 1970 she published A Slipping-Down Life, followed by The Clock Winter in 1972. Her 1985 novel, The Accidental Tourist, was made into the film of the same name in 1988.

Plot Summary

Part One: The Funeral

The novel opens with Ira reflecting on the amount of waste in the world, including his own life. Ira runs his father's picture framing business in Baltimore, while Maggie works as a nurse in a nursing home. On this Saturday they are preparing to go to a funeral, and Maggie is picking up their car from the mechanic's shop. As she drives home, she listens to a call-in radio program, and is convinced that the woman announcing her impending marriage is former daughter-in-law, Fiona. She collects Ira and they set out for the funeral in rural Pennsylvania.

Ira and Maggie argue in the car as he grows increasingly impatient with her wish to drop in and see Fiona and their granddaughter, Leroy. Nearly lost, they stop to buy a map and get coffee in a small town. While Ira checks the map, Maggie confides her family woes in a waitress—much to her husband's disgust. They start driving again, but Maggie becomes so upset that she demands to be let out at the side of the road. A half an hour passes while she constructs an imaginary new life and remembers a brief infatuation with a distinguished nursing home resident. Ira picks her up and they continue their journey.

The Morans are the first to arrive at the church for the funeral. The widow—Maggie's oldest friend, Serena—arrives, and informs them that she wants them to recreate her wedding service as a memorial. This will involve singing the songs from the wedding; in Maggie and Ira's case, a duet of "Love is a Many Splendored Thing." In a key scene, Serena advises Maggie to "throw it all away": to allow things and people to pass out of her life. As other mourners arrive, they either agree or refuse to recreate Serena's wedding ceremony.

Later, Serena shows a film of her marriage ceremony from many years ago. The crowd watches the soundless images and there is much amusement as well as sorrow. Maggie recalls how she first met Ira. Suddenly in love with him all over again, she goes to find him and they begin to make love. Serena catches them at it and throws them out of the house.

Part Two: Breakdown

As in the beginning of the novel, Ira reflects on the opportunities he has missed and the regrets he has about his life. This section is narrated from Ira's perspective, as the couple begins the drive home and Maggie tries to convince him to visit Fiona. On the way, they become stuck behind an erratic driver who nearly runs them off the road. Maggie gets revenge by motioning that the car's wheel is about to come off, but instantly regrets her actions when she sees that the driver is an elderly black man. Remorseful, she forces Ira to turn back to see what happened.

The driver, Mr. Otis, has pulled over; Ira and Maggie pull over to help him. Nothing they say can convince him that his car is okay. The Morans take him to a gas station while he awaits his nephew's tow truck. As Maggie falls into a comfortable familiarity with Mr. Otis, Ira reflects on the emotional "waste" his wife has caused him. The nephew arrives, and the Morans prepare to leave. As they do Mr. Otis comes out with his words of advice, similar to that of Serena's: "Spill it! Spill it all, I say! No way not to spill it!" Ira agrees to pay a visit to Fiona.

Part Three: Homecoming

Maggie reflects on her life: the absence of her granddaughter, then her cat, and her humidifier. It seems that she can't keep anything in perspective. She remembers Fiona's pregnancy—her "breathing lessons." When they arrive at Fiona's house, Leroy doesn't recognize them. While Ira teaches his granddaughter how to play Frisbee, Maggie tries to make Fiona agree to try again with her ex-husband. Maggie invents a story to persuade Fiona how much her son, Jesse, still loves her: she claims that he takes Fiona's old soapbox with him wherever he goes. Fiona, still in love with him, agrees to come to Baltimore for the rest of the weekend. Leroy is overjoyed; she is fascinated by her father, who hasn't visited her in several years.

In an extended flashback sequence, Maggie remembers Jesse and Fiona's courtship and marriage. After Jesse joined a band and dropped out of high school, Fiona was one of his "groupies." After she got pregnant, Maggie persuaded her to give him a chance. Maggie lied to Fiona, therefore establishing a pattern of deception with Fiona. The marriage proves rocky, but everyone loves Leroy as soon as she is born. A shaky peace holds until all of Maggie's lies are revealed. Fiona leaves with Leroy and never comes back.

Back in the present, the travelers stop in at a grocery store and buy Leroy's favorite food. As they return home, Jesse arrives. Fiona asks him where her soapbox is, and of course he doesn't remember a soapbox; it is clear that Maggie has made this up too. Ira tells her the truth: Jesse is already living with a woman, and that he is incapable of sustaining a relationship. Furious, Jesse walks out.

Fiona and Leroy leave too. Shocked and numb, Maggie goes upstairs with ice cream. Her daughter is packing to go away to school. Ira plays solitaire. In denial, Maggie begins a scheme to have Leroy come and live with them and go to school in Baltimore. Ira hushes her and she calms down, asking him what they will have to do for the next twenty years. They hold each other until she becomes peaceful, and then she goes to bed. Tomorrow, like today, they have "a long car trip to make."

Characters

Durwood Clegg

Durwood is one of the few people with whom Maggie has kept in touch from high school. She turned down a date with him because, like her own father, Durwood is "too pliant … too supplicating." When Ira refuses to sing with Maggie at the memorial service, Durwood volunteers to help.

Ben Gabriel

Former owner of a power-tool company, Mr. Gabriel is a patient at the Silver Threads Nursing where Maggie works. For a short time she develops an infatuation with him, until she realizes that he reminds her of her husband.

Serena Gill

Serena is a childhood friend of Maggie's. When her husband dies, Maggie and Ira embark on a road trip to attend the memorial service. An eccentric woman, Serena displays her own gypsy style of dress at the service: sandals, a red dress with a vneck cut and rhinestone sunburst, and a black shawl. In addition, she decides to reenact her wedding at the funeral. Most of the original participants are present, and she asks each to perform the same duties as they did at the wedding. This is ridiculous to everyone, but they indulge her.

Lamont

Lamont is Mr. Otis' earnest nephew. He is responsible and careful young man. When he comes to help his uncle after his automobile mishap, he warns him that he has to be more careful and less trusting.

Daisy Moran

Daisy is youngest of the Moran children. She exemplifies the overachiever: she toilet-trained herself and began waking up early in first grade to lay out her own clothes. Daisy wants to be a quantum physicist and has a scholarship to an Ivy League school. She criticizes her mother, and sometimes seems to barely put up with her.

To her father, Ira, Daisy is far from being normal or, in some sense, human. She seems to have skipped her own youth, never joining in any childish mischief. Ira sees Daisy's "pinched-faced" expression of disapproval as a reflection of his own, and as a sign that Daisy has voluntarily taken on heavy responsibilities prematurely. Daisy is her father's daughter and Ira is painfully aware of it. She proves to be the opposite of her brother, Jesse.

Dorrie Moran

Ira's other older sister, Dorrie, suffers from seizures that momentarily paralyze her left leg. She is also mentally challenged. Dorrie carries around a suitcase full of her most prized possessions.

Fiona Moran

Fiona is Jesse's ex-wife who now lives in Cartwheel, Pennsylvania with her daughter, Leroy. She is a pretty blonde who fell for Jesse, even knowing that he was a musician without prospects or a high school diploma. Tired of living with the Morans and tired of Jesse's incompetence, she divorced him. Now living on her own, she works as a beautician and is studying electrolysis in order to diversify her skills.

Ira Moran

Ira is Maggie's husband. He is a responsible husband and father, and supports his father and two sisters in addition to his family. Ira represents a man in the midst of a mid-age crisis: he regrets some of the choices he has made, and mourns the opportunities that he missed. In a sense, he feels trapped. He deals with these feelings by playing the game of Solitaire.

Ira loves his wife Maggie. Still, he wishes she wouldn't intervene in other people's lives. When she does, he becomes the harsh voice of reason and truth. When he interferes, it is to save Maggie from being blamed for the failure of her schemes.

Jesse Moran

Jesse is the oldest child of Maggie and Ira. Loved and resented by his father, who constantly points out his shortcomings, he is indulged by his mother. He is a high school dropout, and the lead singer of a rock band, Spin the Cat. Like Maggie, Jesse is a dreamer; he is also wild and irresponsible. He is a poor father and was an unfaithful husband to Fiona.

Junie Moran

Junie is Ira's older sister. She suffers from agoraphobia, but is able to momentarily overcome these feelings when she accepts Maggie's idea to go out in public wearing a red wig. The wig enables Junie to momentarily escape the limitations of her condition.

Leroy Moran

Seven-year-old Leroy is Fiona and Jesse's daughter. Much to Maggie's dismay, she hardly remembers her grandparents.

Maggie Moran

Maggie is an impulsive woman who is married to Ira. A middle-class American housewife, she also works as a geriatric nurse and considers herself a natural caregiver. She knows that people consider her flighty and a bit foolish sometimes, especially in comparison to her sensible and predictable husband. A very sensitive and caring woman, tends to put the needs of other people in front of her own; in a sense, she neglects herself and concentrates on everyone else around her.

Media Adaptations

• The television film adaptation of Breathing Lessons was released in 1994. Under the direction of John Erman, the movie starred James Garner, Joanne Woodward, Paul Winfield, and Kathryn Erbe.

In her concern for others, she has made many mistakes. For example, she lies to Fiona in order to save her son's marriage, not realizing that she is hurting others in the process and ignoring the truth. Moreover, when she realizes how lucky she is to have Ira at the funeral, she tries to express her love in a physical manner. Obviously this is inappropriate at a funeral, and she hurts the feelings of Serena, the widow.

Sam Moran

Sam is Ira's elderly father. He sits in his rocking chair above the frame shop all day.

Daniel Otis

Mr. Otis is an elderly African-American man who almost drives the Morans off the road with his car. In response, Maggie prompts Ira to pass the car so she can pull a prank on the driver: she signals that he is losing one of his wheels. When she realizes that he is an older man, Maggie regrets her actions and begs Ira to stop and help him. They cannot convince him that his car is okay; instead, he contacts his nephew to come out and get him.

Anita Palermo

Anita is Serena's mother. Maggie always knew her as a proud woman, until they day she helps Serena move her to the nursing home.

Mrs. Stuckey

Mrs. Stuckey is Fiona's mother. She is a harsh and judgmental woman. Maggie is jealous of her close relationship with Leroy.

Sugar

See Elizabeth Tilghman

Elizabeth Tilghman

Elizabeth Tilghman (also known as Sugar) was the class beauty and an old friend of Serena's. She is concerned with appearances and looks "more like a widow than the widow herself."

Themes

Family

The central theme of Tyler's novel is the dynamic of modern American families. Within that theme, Tyler focuses on the fact that an individual's initial sense of identity derives from his or her relationship with his or her family. For Tyler, the family acts as force on an individual, in both positive and negative ways. In Breathing Lessons, each character has an individual interpretation of the concept of family that coincides with their understanding of their own identity. For example, Ira feels trapped by his family to the point where he felt that "his sisters' hands dragged him down the way drowning victims drag down whoever tries to rescue them." This view of the family extends from Ira's perception of himself as someone cheated out of his dreams. One of those dreams is that a family is loving, loud, boisterous, and fun. Ira's view of his own family as a trap is mirrored in his job as a picture framer. For Ira, the image never changes and it never matches his envisaged ideal portrait.

Maggie's idealized family is busy, exciting, and flexible: she believes that the family can be created with whomever she chooses to make family. In her frenetic and endless family creation, she resembles a mother hen more worried about her extended brood than about herself. Maggie's meddling in the affairs of Jesse and Fiona exposes her concern not so much with marriage, but with keeping her family together. Unlike Ira, Maggie does not give much thought to her own blood relations. Thus, it is ironic that she cites bloodline as her reason for stealing her granddaughter away from Mrs. Stuckey, stating "we're Leroy's grandparents till the day we die."

Marriage

The question of what an ideal marriage recurs in the novel. Everyone has a theory about marriage. Serena married because it was time to marry. Maggie married because she thought she had found her soul mate. Jesse thinks of marriage as a bad habit, the "same old song and dance." As the novel points out, there are rituals and a repetitive pattern to marriage—"the same jokes and affectionate pass-words"—and the same "abiding loyalty and gestures of support and consolations."

The title of the novel metaphorically captures the answer to the question, according to Maggie and Ira. Regular breathing, the exchange of gases or the giving and taking of breath, is life. Similarly, the life of marriage is full of giving and taking. During the novel's one day, Maggie and Ira reveal the many layers of their twenty-eight years together. They are constantly arguing and making up, remembering petty feuds and wondrous delights. When they speak aloud they are not "bickering" but "compiling our two views of things." Marriage is all about sharing the everyday feel of life with another person, and it is this aspect that most bothers the widowed Serena. As she tells Maggie over the phone, she is realizing that Max is not present for discussions about "what the plumbing's up to, and how the red ants have come back in the kitchen." When Maggie offers to discuss the mundane, Serena answers, "but they're not your red ants too, don't you see? I mean you and I are not in this together."

Mr. Otis and his wife, Duluth, present another view of marriage. As their nephew Lamont describes it, their marriage consists of childish bickering. Mr. Otis corrects him, insisting that his marriage with Duluth is full of life and passion. To Mr. Otis, marriage should be something you can look back on fondly from the nursing home. Mr. Otis says he will remember his partnership with Duluth as "a real knock-down, drag-out, heart-and-soul type of couple." Anything else would be dull and worthless, and liable to fall apart like Lamont's marriage.

Human Condition

Tyler's characters negotiate their lives and their relationships with one another in what critic Alice Petry has described as "a messy chaotic world of happenstance." For Tyler, happenstance is what life is all about, and her characters deal with situations many readers will understand. The ways in which Tyler's characters carry out their negotiation through everyday life differ. These disparate ideas and ways of managing give rise to the humor and the tension of the novel.

The clearest example stems from a comparison of the Morans. Ira is very serious, as he tries to play with the "hand" he has been dealt in the form of a full house: crazy siblings, "ailing" father, incompetent son, and an introverted daughter. On the other hand, Maggie is playing games. As Ira reflects:

And his wife! He loved her, but he couldn't stand how she refused to take her own life seriously. She seemed to believe it was a sort of practice life, something she could afford to play around with as if they offered second and third chances to get it right. She was always making clumsy, impetuous rushes toward nowhere in particular—side trips, random detours.

Serena (a play on the word serene) and Mr. Otis suggest that people have to step back and look at themselves once in a while. Doing this enables the individual to see his blind spots. Mr. Otis offers this lesson in self-improvement through the parable of his dog, Bessie. Bessie was a smart dog, but nevertheless when she played fetch and the ball landed on a chair, Bessie would go after it through the spindles of the back of the chair. All she had to do was go around, but she insisted on getting the ball her way. Bessie was "blind in spots." Humans do the same thing; everyone desperately wants to have things their way. Mr. Otis believe that if people would stop a moment and examine their own situation, they could then see the obstacle which prevents them from getting what they most want in life.

Style

Point of View

Breathing Lessons utilizes a third-person omniscient narrative, with the middle section told from Ira's point of view. The first and last sections are Maggie's interpretations of events. The two viewpoints allow both character to provide their perspective on their lives and long marriage.

Topics for Further Study

• The legal issues of child custody and visitation The legal issues of child custody and visitation rights have become more complex recently. What rights have the courts awarded to grandparents? What is your view on the issue?
• What is the role of game playing in the novel? How do games demonstrate the motif of breathing lessons or support Tyler's large themes?
• Considered to be a triumph of urban revitalization, how is Harborplace doing today? Locate some pictures or film of the area and provide a description. Has it exceeded the hopes of the city planners in Baltimore?
• Tyler's novel returns to the topic of the nursing home repeatedly. Research the quality of nursing home care across the United States in the late 1980s. How does it compare with the care given in today's nursing homes? What does the placing of senior citizens in nursing homes say about the value our society places on the elderly, then or now?

Comedy of Manners

Works that are considered "comedy of manners" are witty and cerebral. In such works, the characters struggle to uphold appearances and social standards. The plot normally revolves around a sexual affair, or another sort of scandal. Like all comedies, the comedy of manners uses humor to teach a lesson. The greatest modern artist who wrote such works was the French playwright, Moliere. He pokes fun of society's morality, especially in terms of the religious hypocrisy that marked the seventeenth century. A more recent example in English is Oscar Wilde. His Importance of Being Earnest (1899) is a brilliant examination of the hypocrisy in British society.

Tyler uses comedy throughout her fiction. Much of the comedy in Breathing Lessons develops out of embarrassing situations that occur as a result of bad manners. It is not proper on any occasion to sneak into your host's bedroom and have sex there with your husband. It is especially improper to do so during a funeral dinner. Tyler pulls this off, in part because the reader will believe that Ira and Maggie have given up sex. The subtle touches are the key; Serena stares at Ira with "his open zipper and his shirttail flaring out." Yet the scene doesn't simply end; Maggie tries to put a good face on it, and says, "well, bye now!" to everyone.

Tyler's humor is often tragicomic; the situations are funny because no one is hurt. The best example occurs in the beginning of the novel. Maggie's absent-minded collision with the Pepsi truck is comedic only because no one was injured or died. Other moments of humor are due to unusual associations and juxtapositions. A love song is written on a coupon, which Maggie later hands to a store clerk. Religion is mocked when a billboard with a spiritual message is given the same attention as a billboard with an advertisement.

Time

One of the original sources for dramatic theory in Western European literature is Aristotle's Poetics, composed around 330 BCE. In this study, he establishes rules to govern the construction of a comedy or tragedy. One area of the Aristotelian rules gives us the "unities": unity of action, unity of place, and unity of time. According to the rule of the unity of time, the action of a drama should take place in just one day. Tyler's use of Aristotle's rule frames the action: the novel begins when Maggie and Ira oversleep, and it ends with them going back to sleep.

Another way time is used by Tyler is the flashback. This technique disrupts the chronology of the day with episodes of reminiscence on the parts of Maggie or Ira. A flashback differs from the narrative stories that, for example, Mr. Otis tells. Flashbacks, in this novel, are internal to Maggie or Ira's mind. Moreover, a flashback can be interrupted by someone and then returned to, sometimes more clearly. This happens to Ira when he remembers the infamous trip to Harborplace, both during and after the run-in with Mr. Otis. It is during the second flashback that he has his benevolent epiphany, which he soon forgets.

Picaresque

In its early form, the picaresque novel resembles the loosely structured tales of romance, such as the stories from the Arthurian cycle, Tristram and Iseult, or Gargantua and Pantagruel. Essentially a first-person narrative, the picaresque novel chronicles the accidental adventures and rewards experienced by a knight-errant while on his quest. The adventures often include conflicts with other knights or dragons, and the reward ranges from wisdom to money or gold. Since Don Quixote, which was written in the early seventeenth century, the picaresque hero typically has a less serious sidekick, acting as comic relief. The story form from that time on begins to take on humorous overtones, until it becomes downright bawdy, with Henry Fielding's eighteenth-century tale of Tom Jones.

Breathing Lessons employs many picaresque elements. The serious protagonist is Ira, on a quest to get to the funeral and back home. He wants to follow the map from point A to point B. Maggie is not so linear and would prefer to go with the flow, "all we've got to do is watch the road signs." Maggie is the Sancho Panza to Ira's Don Quixote—an amusing, light-hearted companion. She is in charge of navigation, but she didn't bring "that map." Instead, she dreams up a map of adventure: to rescue the fair Leroy from her imprisonment in Cartwheel. Accidents and distractions lead to many smaller adventures. Like all good picaresque tales, the reader is sure that tomorrow's journey with daughter Daisy will be anything but uneventful.

Historical Context

Political Apathy

Poor economic conditions at the end of the 1970s led to a change in the political landscape of America. In 1980 Ronald Reagan won the presidential election with only 51.6 percent of the popular vote. His "landslide victory" resulted from a turnout of only fifty-four percent of the voting-age population. In other words, only twenty-seven per-cent of all eligible voters elected Reagan to office. Many commentators expressed disappointment over voter apathy and the lack of democratic participation.

The Decade of Greed and the Working Class

In 1981 Reagan restructured the tax code. His theory that deep tax cuts would be offset by an increase in employment rates and tax revenue through greater capital investment—known as trickle-down theory—was proven false, just as Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief guaranteed. According to Forbes Magazine, the richest one percent of Americans gained a combined total of one trillion dollars between 1979 and 1990. In other words, a greater stratification between rich and poor was the result of early 1980s economic policy.

Race Relations

In a 1988 Newsweek poll, seventy-one percent of African Americans concurred with the statement that the United States government was not doing enough to help blacks in the United States. The year before, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members assaulted civil rights marchers celebrating the recently established Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in Forsyth County, Georgia. The Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center documented forty-five arson cases and cross burnings, as well as hundreds of acts of vandalism against African Americans between 1985 and 1987.

Meanwhile, although the numbers of new recruits to the Klan increased, so did the number of people that attended counter-Klan rallies. Louis Farrakhan, who represented a minority of the African American community, antagonized many people with his speeches against Jews and whites. In 1989, David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Klan, won a seat in the state legislature of Louisiana, much to the embarrassment of the Republican Party.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson encouraged a policy of racial harmony. He challenged the democratic establishment by mounting a second presidential campaign. While not endorsed by the Democratic Party, he became a hero to many black Americans. Under his leadership, the Rainbow Coalition became a political force on behalf of the "rejected and despised." In response, the Republican Party attempted to attract new minority members and put forth the idea of the party as a "big tent" tolerant of differing opinions.

World Affairs

Peace initiatives all over the world were prevalent in 1988. The Iran-Iraq war ended in a tentative cease-fire in August. Soviet troops began to withdraw from Afghanistan. In December of 1988, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat gave an address to the United Nations in which he rejected military violence, recognized the existence of Israel, and declared that only a political solution will resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. His words were greeted warmly by all sides, but Arafat lost this initiative when he publicly supported Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War.

In Burma, a period of hope known as the "Burmese Spring" seemed to be softening the dictatorial powers ruling the country. From March to September, hundreds of thousands of students and young people demonstrated in favor of democratic reforms. Finally, the army cracked down on the demonstrators in a gruesome display of force beginning September 18. Hundreds of people were killed, dissidents were jailed, and the country's name was changed to Myanmar.

Critical Overview

It wasn't until after her fifth novel and Gail Godwin and John Updike wrote positive reviews of her work that Tyler garnered critical and commercial attention. Since then, she has attracted a large following. While Tyler is considered an excellent writer and novelist, her work does not fit with current academic interest and her long-term reputation is uncertain.

Breathing Lessons received the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. Initial reviews of the novels derided the comparison of Maggie to Lucy, the character portrayed by Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy. Critics felt that the comparison with television's favorite comedic character was not appropriate in a work of complex literature. Another focus of early reviews was the many digressions from the main movement of the story.

Many critics fail to move beyond the subject matter of Tyler's novels. They have difficulty getting past the fact that Tyler writes about domesticity. However, many critics are captivated by Tyler's techniques. Gene Koppel found Tyler's game theory approach to domestic manners intriguing. He asserted that "Breathing Lessons makes an unambiguous point about the need for the game-spirit to be accompanied by a sense of responsibility and by the ability to endure through adversity."

Several commentators have focused on Tyler's employment of African American characters in her novels. Alice Hall Petry addressed this issue; she surveys the ways in which black characters in other Tyler novels embody practical knowledge that the main white characters are looking for:

Perhaps Mr. Otis, that angel bearing a message of survival, could ascertain these truths precisely because he, as an elderly black man, had always been an outsider. As someone excluded from the mainstream of southern white society for decades, he did not have the luxury of falling into the counterproductive lifestyle of those with more opportunities, more education, and more money. He had to learn to see things aright in order to survive.

Petry concluded: "thanks to the wisdom and dignity of her black characters, Anne Tyler's novels—full of sudden death, dysfunctional families and disappointment—are indeed ultimately bright books of life."

Barbara A. Bennett focused on Tyler's humor. Bennett maintained that Tyler's use of humor makes ordinary times and ordinary people interesting. She went on to reveal the four categories of humor, "each of which serves a specific purpose in extending the theme of miscommunication."

(1) Linguistic errors that characters make either consciously or subconsciously; (2) The psychological shift or attempt to divert attention away from the real issue; (3) Inadequate words in communication; and (4) Non-traditional means of communication.

She then surveyed the comedic techniques Tyler utilizes, particularly an example of Freudian slips as well as a spoonerism in "You're just a twick!"

In his review, Richard Eder asserted that "Tyler only seems to be a realist." He means that though her style leads one to think that she is simply describing events and people in them, Tyler is actually imparting lessons about life to the readers and the characters. For example, Eder maintained that "weddings are Tyler's moments of truth, equivalent to Hemingway's hunting and fishing exploits, though funnier." Characteristically, these moments of truths and lesson learning are brought about by physical moments, similar to Henry Fielding's picaresque stories. "Tyler does not condemn her characters to stasis. She lets them move, though never as much as they think they are moving. She teaches them to blunder into the art of letting life subvert them." There are risks to Tyler's methods, according to Eder:

Subversion—the parade that brings clowns, the clowns that bring a parade—is her art too, and the risk that goes with it. Pick up too many outriders, particularly if they are dedicated to slipping spokes in the wheel, and your vehicle slows. Momentum is Tyler's difficulty; even in her best novels there are moments when vitality flags and things bog down.

Eder hinted that this may be part of Tyler's technique: her novels imitate the automobile, constantly being renewed and bashed up again.

Criticism

Tabitha McIntosh-Byrd

Tabitha McIntosh-Byrd is a doctoral candidate and English literature instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. In the following essay, she analyzes the use of formal, biological, and "game" narratives of time in Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons.

When Maggie Moran hears the question, "What Makes an Ideal Marriage?" on the radio, it causes her to crash her car. This question recurs throughout the novel, and is asked and answered by multiple characters at key stages of the day. It also brings together the novel's central imagery and motifs. The car is the "vehicle" through which both the plot and the Morans' marriage will be propelled—a literal mode of travel and a metaphoric representation of life itself. Maggie's relationship to time, odometers, and topography mirrors her personal journey to an ambiguous destination, while Ira's obsession with speed and efficiency works in an opposite, though equally revelatory, manner. In the final analysis, both Morans must realize that there is no "final destination" that can be reached by either shortcuts or circumnavigation. Like Ira's interminable card playing, there is only the random chance of the game.

The structure of Tyler's novel acts as a metacommentary on these major thematic concerns. The book is organized by an extremely rigid chronological framework that is undermined and interrupted by flashback sequences. It thus conforms to and deviates from the dramatic "Unity of Time"—Aristotle's rule that establishes that the action of a drama should take place in a single day. Breathing Lessons begins when the Morans awake to go on a journey and ends with them falling asleep in expectation of another journey; this structure neatly frames the narrative just as Ira literally provides "frames" in his job.

Within this framework lies a confused picture of a marriage. The narrative is told from both Maggie and Ira's perspective, tracing their memories and experiences as current events recall past ones. Like the chronological rigidity of the "present" story, the past is equally structured—organized as a series of layered versions of events that repeat and restate themselves until they arrive at a denouement in the final pages of the novel.

In this way, Maggie plays and replays her memories of Jesse, delaying her final recollection of events until circumstances force her to remember the traumatic end of his marriage in full. At the same time, this sequence of memories is directly mapped onto the unfolding of the present. Maggie's impulsive "white lie" that brought Jesse and Fiona together parallels her creation of a new lie to reunite them: the crib that Jesse was supposed to be building, and the soapbox which he is supposed to be keeping for Fiona's sake. The pressures of these two lies build in tandem within each storyline, reaching a head in both Maggie's present and past tenses at the same time.

Despite Ira's role as a vehicle of revelation in Maggie's repressed memories, he too is subject to repetition of the past until true recollection is achieved, as shown in his expanding versions of the infamous trip to Harborplace, both during and after the run-in with Mr. Otis. It is during the second flashback that he has epiphany—that "the real waste" of his life lies in not realizing how much he loves his family. For Ira, as for his wife, such revelations are both painful and traumatic, disrupting the extremely fixed chronological stories they tell about themselves. Both Morans experience the past as a disruption of their present myths of selfhood—transforming Maggie from a helper to a meddler, and Ira from a martyr to a willing victim. Indeed, both Morans literalize the homonymic relationship between time and nerves—the two meanings of the word "tense."

The insistent use of direct repetition—including whole pages of reproduced text as well as reiterated allusions and textual echoes—adds a rather different interpretive angle to this neat parallel of time and action. Instead of artistic satisfaction, the structural shadowing acts as a signifier of oppression, emphasizing the trapped lives of the characters contained within the pages of the text. Maggie and Ira are locked into a rigidly formal sequence of behavior. Ira is obsessed with maps and waste—his favorite books are mariner narratives. As Fiona says, these are just a more sophisticated version of the "How to get from A to B" stories "that men love so much."

What Do I Read Next?

• Star employee of Baltimore's Rent-a-Back, Inc., Barnaby Gaitlan is the protagonist of Tyler's most recent novel, A Patchwork Planet (1998). At the age of thirty, Barnaby is divorced and still not finished with college or free of a debt to his parents. He helps senior citizens sort out their attics and basements while they fend off attempts to put them in nursing homes.
• In Mary Pipher's study, Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders (1999), she turns her attention to the psychological trauma and emotional difficulty surrounding what has become the last phase of life in America: the nursing home.
• Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) relates the family history of the Tull family. Pearl is abandoned by her traveling salesman husband and has to raise three children on her own.
• The Accidental Tourist (1985) remains a favorite of many of Tyler's fans. The story concerns recently divorced travel writer Macon Leary, who hates travel. Macon moves home with his temperamental dog, Edward, and has a relationship with the dog's trainer.
• If anyone can be considered Tyler's inspiration, it is Eudora Welty. Her collection of short stories, The Golden Apples (1949), is Tyler's favorite collection. Most of the stories are set in Morgana, a town on the Mississippi Delta, and contains elements of Greek mythology.
• Flannery O'Connor's sense of the absurd and the gothic has been an influence on many writers. Her posthumous collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), focuses on a series of flawed characters with comic detachment.

What Ira does not understand is that he is as stuck in the endless dance of repetition and restatement as his wife is. Nowhere is this made clearer than in the first page of Part Two—a word for word recapitulation of the novel's opening page: "For the past several months now, Ira had been noticing the human race's wastefulness." The restatement transforms Ira's words from insight into a symptom of blindness: rather than "noticing," Ira is merely repeating himself. His words become the literal embodiment of the "waste" he decries: a surfeit of repeated language that empties out all inherent meaning from itself, carrying his character and the plot nowhere. Ira's thoughts be-come through this restatement, not so much valid self-analysis, but the lack of it—a pattern no more or less progressive than the "dance" of Jesse's arguments with his parents that he is impelled to repeat with Fiona.

This habituated behavior is exemplified by Ira's rigid habits: his endless games of Solitaire and his self-revealing whistling. Again, Tyler's use of chronology literalizes both metaphors and homonymic relationships between terms. Ira's moments of crisis and revelation are juxtaposed with his games so that a gradual picture emerges of him "playing the hand he has been dealt" in life as well as Solitaire. His "full house" of challenging and challenged family members requires as much ceaseless shuffling and reshuffling as his card games, and—like those card games—has been ritualistically complicated through his own choice. Ira's understanding that both are just "games" of his own devising is as delayed and hidden from him as is his habit of revealing his thoughts by whistling songs whose lyrics can be applied to the situation. Indeed, his chief irritation with Maggie is that she acts as the game playing interrupter of his linear rationalism. As he reflects:

And his wife! He loved her, but he couldn't stand how she refused to take her own life seriously. She seemed to believe it was a sort of practice life, something she could afford to play around with as if they offered second and third chances to get it right. She was always making clumsy, impetuous rushes toward nowhere in particular—side trips, random detours.

In fact, Maggie is just as serious as he is, and just as unable to accept that the events into which she is thrust are as random and nonsequential as a hand of cards. Serena makes this controlling metaphor explicit when she advises Maggie to let go of her emotional attachments to the past with the words, "Discard! Discard!" Though Ira considers his wife full of "clumsy, impetuous rushes," and though Maggie's narrative persona appears to fulfill this by shifting with seeming random through experiential time, it is Serena who realizes that her old friend's mind is as bound by formal structure as Ira's. Maggie's "side-trips" to the past occur for deliberate reasons, triggered by specific stresses and functional needs. Like Ira, she is obsessed with "end games." For Ira, these are shortcuts and navigation. For Maggie they are destinations, deaths, and happy endings.

Nowhere is this division between the spouses more apparent than in their relationship to traveling. Ira searches for a map—a formal structure composed of grids and squares through which to interpret the nonlinear landscape. He must "frame" the journey in the same way that he creates frames for his customers, elevating the "random" to the status of the "meaningful." Maggie, on the other hand, becomes obsessed by the process of their journey—watching the odometer to make sure that it corresponds with the road markers. The tension of waiting for the gauges to synchronize causes her to reach the point of exhaustion. As she says, "This is making me a nervous wreck…. I feel like I've been through a ringer." Her own ritualistic pattern formation is neatly uncovered in this small vignette—Maggie is a woman obsessed with resolutions and synchronicities. Her nearly hysterical need to make the miles and markers correspond is a displacement of her equally hysterical need to make the milestones of her family correspond to the rhythm of the imagined "Ideal Marriage" of the opening pages. Like Ira, she refuses to accept that there is no overarching pattern to life, and that she must "discard" half of her hand in order to achieve peace.

Less obvious, but no less formally significant, is the use of biological time as a structural device both in Tyler's novel and in her presentation of Maggie's self-awareness. Maggie is a woman standing at a very specific point in her physiological chronology: menopause. As Virginia Schaefer Carroll points out, Tyler's heroine is in the middle of the "climacteric"—"a sequence of emotional and physiological transitions experienced by women from age thirty-five to sixty." The essential, unstated fact that lies at the heart of Breathing Lessons is Maggie's approaching menopause.

When this is taken into account, her random "dashes" and side trips attain central points of departure and arrival—the need to create a stable identity that is not based on motherhood. The apparently random digressions attain new meaning: all of Maggie's memories can be seen to be specifically tied to her need to be needed, evidenced in her remembered or imagined roles as a nurse's aide, a wife, a lover, and a mother. As in so many key motifs of the novel, this revelation into character motivation is given in part through literalized metaphors: in Maggie's career as well as her sense of self-worth she can only understand herself as a "care giver."

The fact that all of these issues are tied together in one central sense of loss is made clear in Maggie's pivotal conversation with Serena at the funeral. In the only direct reference to menopause in the novel, Serena advises her friend to:

Let it all go!… You don't have any choice…. That's what it comes down to in the end." You start shucking off your children from the day you give birth. Throw out the toys in the basement. Move to a smaller house.

Though menopause "delights" Serena, Maggie is horrified at the thought of letting go, and her response lays bare her sense of herself as "career carer":

I don't feel I'm letting go; I feel they're taking things away from me. My son's grown up and my daughter's leaving for college and they're talking at the nursing home about laying off some of the workers.

Maggie is afraid of being made "redundant"—both literally (in her job), and metaphorically (as a mother). When this biological chronology is factored into an understanding of the rest of the chronological devices at play in Breathing Lessons, the repetition and restatement of the novel's formal structure become suddenly clear. Like Maggie herself, the text experiences itself and is experienced as a series of repeated gatherings and purges—ritualistic reenactments of events, memories, and words that mirror the repeated motions of Maggie's menstrual cycle. When Maggie finally acknowledges the end of that cycle, the novel, like her motherhood, ends on a note as uncertain and ambiguous as her final question: "Oh, Ira … what are we two going to live for, the rest of our lives?"

Source: Tabitha McIntosh-Byrd, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 2000.

Gene Koppel

In the following essay, Koppel discusses the game playing in Tyler's Breathing Lessons and the assertion that a balance between game playing and responsibility is necessary to live successfully.

When Maggie Moran, a nursing assistant in a home for the elderly and the central character of Anne Tyler's novel Breathing Lessons, tries to locate a favorite patient during a fire drill, the resulting fiasco bears more than a coincidental resemblance to a slapstick scene from an I Love Lucy episode. Maggie ends up in a part of the home off-limits to her and leaps into a laundry cart to conceal herself when she thinks she detects the approach of a supervisor:

Absurd, she knew it instantly. She was cursing herself even as she sank among the crumpled linens. She might have got away with it, though, except that she'd set the cart to rolling. Somebody grabbed it and drew it to a halt. A growly voice said, "What in the world?"

It is not a supervisor, but a fellow employee. The latter, however, having discovered Maggie inside the cart, mischievously calls over another attendant standing nearby and together the two noisily and rapidly push the cart down the corridor. At the end of Maggie's ride stand, of course, the two people who can embarrass her the most, Mrs. In-man, "the director of nursing for the entire home," and the man Maggie was seeking, Mr. Gabriel. The latter is a dignified gentleman whom Maggie admires and who (she believes) had admired Maggie for her competence and self-command. He will think of her this way no longer.

That Anne Tyler expects the reader to compare Maggie Moran's laundry-cart episode to television situation comedy is clearly indicated one page later:

Maybe [Mr. Gabriel] could view her as a sort of I Love Lucy type—madcap, fun-loving, full of irrepressible high spirits. That was one way to look at it. Actually, Maggie had never liked I Love Lucy. She thought the plots were so engineered—that dizzy woman's failures just built-in, just guaranteed. But maybe Mr. Gabriel felt differently.

But Mr. Gabriel is not amused by his real-life Lucy; his idealization of Maggie ends with this incident. The reader's interest in Maggie, however, continues. Unlike Mr. Gabriel, the reader has never had illusions about Maggie. That aspects of her character are similar to Lucy Ricardo's has probably occurred to him before. For example, in the opening scene of the novel Maggie calls for the family car at the body shop; the moment she pulls into the street she collides with a truck [she had turned on her radio to a local talk show and mistakenly thought she heard the voice of her former daughter-in-law announcing an approaching second marriage]. Hearing the crash, the manager of the body shop rushes out; when he yells,

"What the …? Are you all right?" she stared straight ahead in a dignified way and told him, "Certainly. Why do you ask?" and drove on before the Pepsi driver could climb out of his truck, which was probably just as well considering the look on his face.

Maggie's resemblance to Lucy has been implicit since the beginning of the novel.

If a reader wishes, it would be easy to argue that the above Lucy-passages work to undercut the positive elements in Maggie's character; some of the early reviewers of Breathing Lessons disapproved of Tyler's associating her heroine with a popular television character. Still, I do not believe that most readers will respond to Maggie's failures with the easy, condescending laughter that they give to the shallow farce of a typical television comedy. For both Maggie's games and the textual world which contains them are related to actual life in complex ways which Lucy's games are not.

While many of the pursuits and activities of our everyday world are often casually referred to as "games," most people (not only book reviewers) look askance at those, like Maggie, who seem to have difficulty distinguishing "real life" from actual games. Ira Moran clearly disapproves of Maggie's confusion of life and play:

And his wife! He loved her, but he couldn't stand how she refused to take her own life seriously. She seemed to believe it was a sort of practice life, something she could afford to play around with as if they offered second and third chances to get it right. She was always making clumsy, impetuous rushes toward nowhere in particular—side trips, random detours.

The truth is—if we judge him by our society's standards of financial and social success—Ira Moran has fared no better than Maggie in the real world. Both were highly intelligent, promising high-school students. After high school, however, Ira reluctantly took over his family's picture-framing shop to support his hypochondriac father and two agoraphobic sisters instead of pursuing his plan to become a doctor. Maggie more willingly gave up her chance to go to Goucher College, becoming instead a nurse's aid in a retirement home. Both are quite aware that they are, in the usual sense of the word, failures. Ira laments that he "was fifty years old and had never accomplished one single act of consequence." And, during a depressed moment, Maggie makes an assessment of their lives that is even more depressing than Ira's:

What Maggie's mother said was true: The generations were sliding downhill in this family. They were descending in every respect, not just in their professions and educations but in the way they reared their children and the way they ran their households.

Thus the Morans realize that the great majority of their contemporaries must consider them to be almost completely inept at the game of success—a game which many believe is the most serious thing in life.

On the other hand, Maggie and Ira are also aware that the game of material success is not "the only game in town." During a rare family outing to the Baltimore harbor, when he seriously considers the value of the commitment she has made, Ira's regrets disappear:

He hugged [his sister Dorrie's] bony little body close and gazed over her head at the Constellation floating in the fog…. And Junie had pressed close to his other side and Maggie and [his father] Sam had watched steadfastly, waiting for him to say what to do next. He had known then what the true waste was: Lord, yes. It was not his having to support these people but his failure to notice how he loved them.

Ira is only human and thus cannot sustain this intense awareness of his love for these helpless, difficult people for more than an "instant," but there is no doubt that this love plays an important role in authenticating his existence. And the reader also does not doubt that Maggie finds in her work and in her efforts (wise and otherwise) to love and help her family what she needs to consider her life worthwhile.

Ira's disapproval of Maggie's less-than-serious approach to life might lead the reader to suppose that Ira himself has little room in his life for playing games, but this would not be true. There are two pastimes that Ira holds dear. The first is an elaborate form of solitaire in which he indulges as often as possible; the second is losing himself in books which center on the adventures of lonely explorers: "It struck [Maggie] as very significant that Ira's idea of entertainment was those interminable books about men who sailed the Atlantic absolutely alone." These books obviously provide Ira with vicarious adventures which give him relief from his daily routines and responsibilities, but Maggie is correct about the significance of his preference for solitary heroes. Earlier we learned that "Ira didn't have any friends. It was one of the things Maggie minded about him." And we also learn that Ira cannot cope with life's grimmer contingencies (which is rather ironic, when one remembers that he had longed to be a doctor):

How peculiar [Ira] was about death! He couldn't handle even minor illness and had found reasons to stay away from the hospital the time she had her appendix out…. Whenever one of the children fell sick, he'd pretended it wasn't happening…. Any hint that he wouldn't live forever—when he had to deal with life insurance, for instance—made him grow set-faced and stubborn and resentful.

Perhaps, then, Ira's favorite game of solitaire, which he plays with a deck of cards he keeps in his pocket (he even carries it on the funeral journey that takes up the first section of the novel), provides him with a framework within which he can cope with and even enjoy the element of contingency which terrifies him in the actual world. And as there is nothing in our lives that is either more important or more undependable than our fellow human beings, it is clear why Ira's imaginings are most comfortable when they center on vicarious voyaging with men whose isolation makes them impervious to the unreliability of any other person. The books about solitary explorers and the games of solitaire provide him with frameworks within which he can confidently face the unpredictable element in life—as his making and selling of picture frames provide him and his family another kind of "framework" to order life in a way they find tolerable. (There is a roughly parallel situation in The Accidental Tourist with Macon Leary and his family; the latter are also more terrified of the unpredictable world and even more irrationally compulsive in their routines than Macon himself.)

The readers of Breathing Lessons, like the viewers of I Love Lucy, know that the heroine's game-strategies are comically doomed from the beginning. And Maggie—as Lucy would be in her place—is pathetically sincere about her devious, far-fetched scheme of reuniting her terminally immature son, Jesse, with his former wife, Fiona, and his daughter (and Maggie's only grandchild), Leroy. First, on their way back from the funeral, Maggie persuades Ira to detour to the small town where Fiona is living with her mother. Next, she manipulates Fiona and Leroy into riding back with her and Ira to their home in Baltimore where (through a surreptitious telephone call from Fiona's home) she has arranged for Jesse to appear at dinner.

The reunion dinner proves to be a fiasco. Jesse, fearful that his ex-wife and his family view him as a "loser" (the word that game-players dread hearing above any other), is too tense and defensive to control his childish ego and his temper long enough to establish any kind of meaningful communication with his wife and daughter. But it is Ira who brings the dinner to a sudden end with a brutally frank condemnation of his son. He reveals to Fiona that Jesse is living with another woman and then describes what he believes is his son's permanent inability to overcome his inadequacies:

This is the way things are … [Jesse] never was fit husband material! He passes from girlfriend to girlfriend and he can't seem to hold the same job for longer than a few months; and every job he loses, it's somebody else's fault.

As a result of this speech, Jesse (rapidly followed by Fiona and Leroy) walks out on Maggie's reconciliation dinner.

What conclusion is the reader supposed to draw from this incident—that Ira sees Jesse and others as they really are and Maggie sees them as she would like them to be? As Ira had explained to Fiona earlier, "It's Maggie's weakness: She believes it's all right to alter people's lives. She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her view of them."

Is the reader, then, to conclude that Maggie views life as a game she can play according to her own rules and for her own amusement, in the course of which she is free to manipulate others? And, of course, to treat people as objects to be manipulated is unKantian, unChristian, and generally inhumane. This is certainly a possible interpretation of Maggie, but other factors are present in the text to qualify or even to reverse these conclusions. Maggie's rose-tinted glasses can be seen partly as weakness, partly as charity towards others. Similarly to Miss Bates in Emma, Maggie actually sees those she loves as better than they are: she is convinced that Jesse is nearly the young man she wants him badly to be and that he could be happily reunited with his family:

She was in trouble with everybody in this house, and she deserved to be; as usual she had acted pushy and meddlesome. And yet it hadn't seemed like meddling while she was doing it. She had simply felt as if the world were the tiniest bit out of focus, the colors not quite within the lines—something like a poorly printed newspaper ad—and if she made the smallest adjustment then everything would settle perfectly into place.

If Maggie's inability to see life in all its grim reality can be considered, at least in part, a positive side to her character, Ira's clear-headed realism has its negative aspect. Ira has a deep fear, it will be recalled, of life's contingencies. Since his mother's death when he was fourteen, he has tried to avoid all thoughts of sickness or death or any other of life's unpleasant surprises. He refuses to make friends, obviously because friends, more often than family, disappoint one or prove unreliable. Thus there is a distinct possibility that his unchanging, bleak view of his son owes as much to his fear that hope will lead to disappointment as it does to the presence of an inner strength which always leads him to see things realistically. When Maggie interferes in the lives of Jesse and Fiona, it is to reunite them. When Ira interferes, it is to end the suspense associated with the shaky relationship of his son and Fiona. In this way Ira brings about the sad but secure state of a defeated relationship; Ira need no longer be disturbed by the insecure hope that his son will make a success of his marriage. It is a fear of life as much as the courage to face reality that underlies Ira's refusal to entertain illusions. On the other hand, Maggie is open to life in all its unpredictabilities: "Oh, Ira, you just don't give enough credit to luck," she says at one point. "Good luck or bad luck, either one." But giving credit to luck, to the unpredictability of life, is what Ira fears most.

Since Ira and Maggie are so different in their attitudes toward the contingencies of life, it might appear at first glance that the success of their marriage is either poorly conceived fiction or outright miracle. How somber, defensive Ira, with his rigidly ordered approach to life can tolerate, much less love his outgoing, recklessly playful wife is not an easy problem to resolve. There is no doubt, however, that Ira does love Maggie: "Well, face it, there were worse careers than cutting forty-five-degree angles in strips of gilded molding. And he did have Maggie, eventually—dropping into his lap like a wonderful gift out of nowhere." This unexpected development in his life Ira accepts without regret! I believe that the insight of Tony Tanner into the happy relationship of Jane Austen's stuffy hero, Fitzwilliam Darcy, and her light-hearted heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice will also serve for Anne Tyler's contrasting couple:

… in their gradual coming together and Darcy's persistent desire for Elizabeth we do witness the perennial yearning of perfect symmetry for the asymmetrical, the appeal which 'playfulness' has for 'regulation', the irresistible attraction of the freely rambling individual for the rigidified upholder of the group. Indeed it could be said that it is on the tension between playfulness and regulation that society depends, and it is the fact that they are so happily 'united' by the end of the book which generates the satisfaction produced by the match.

The insight that successful relationships and successful societies need both the spirit of the game and the spirit of discipline not only explains Maggie and Ira Moran's satisfying marriage, it also explains why their son Jesse, who as a child loved to make up stories that "had in common the theme of joyousness, of the triumph of sheer fun over practicality," fails at every relationship and every task he attempts. What Jesse does not have, as Ira pointed out above, is perseverance, a sense of duty or responsibility which is necessary to sustain any relationship. Without this even Jesse's potential for love, which is very real, is largely wasted. As important as love is in Anne Tyler's fictional world, it cannot survive unless those who love are willing to adjust to and often simply to endure the complexities and strains which are always present in adult relationships. Ira's love for his emotionally maimed father and sisters is an obvious example of how much strength and sustained sacrifice can be demanded by those whom one loves. And in the central relationship in the novel, Ira and Maggie had to make drastic changes in their romantic expectations of each other. In the bedroom of Serena's house after the funeral Maggie discovers Ira alone, playing his game of solitaire, and reminisces with him about the early days of their marriage:

He pondered a king, while Maggie laid her cheek on the top of his head. She seemed to have fallen in love again. In love with her own husband! The convenience of it pleased her—like finding right in her pantry all the fixings she needed for a new recipe.

"Remember the first year we were married?" she asked him. "It was awful. We fought every minute."

"Worst year of my life," he agreed, and when she moved around to the front he sat back slightly so she could settle on his lap. His thighs beneath her were long and bony—two planks of lumber "Careful of my cards," he told her, but she could feel he was getting interested.

Of course, Maggie and Ira both have their moments of regretting the lost dreams of youth, the dreams of the perfect mate. Maggie realizes that her nursing-home friendship with Mr. Gabriel (before the Lucy-side of her emerged and destroyed his image of her) was a subconscious attempt to revive her (and Ira's) youthful romantic fantasies: "All Mr. Gabriel was, in fact, was Maggie's attempt to find an earlier version of Ira. She'd wanted the version she had known at the start of their marriage, before she'd begun disappointing him." But Maggie and Ira's love has survived the rough journey into reality. Jesse's love for his wife, Fiona, is capable of little more than beginning the trip.

Thus Breathing Lessons makes an unambiguous point about the need for the game-spirit to be accompanied by a sense of responsibility and by the ability to endure through adversity. Without this "rule" of an underlying stable commitment the marriage-game has little chance of lasting long enough to bring fulfillment to the players. But there is also no doubt that the main emphasis of the novel is on the need of a spirit of play if a person is to be truly fulfilled.

The very form of the work itself attests to this. Ira Moran, it will be recalled, is frequently exasperated by Maggie's refusal to recognize that life is a deadly serious business; instead of living in dread of making wasteful errors, "She was always making clumsy, impetuous rushes toward nowhere in particular—side trips, random detours." And at the center (both literally and figuratively) of Anne Tyler's plot there is such a side trip, a seemingly random—and quite lengthy—detour with no apparent purpose. It comes about on the Morans' return trip from the funeral. Irritated by the erratic driving of an elderly African-American in front of them, Maggie shouts at the driver as Ira finally manages to pass him that his wheel is coming off. Then, guilt stricken, Maggie forces Ira to return to where the old man has stopped and gotten out of his car to contemplate his (falsely) suspect wheel. After some consideration, Mr. Otis (the name of the old man) gets into the Moran Dodge and Ira detours off the main highway and drives him to a Texaco station managed by his nephew, Lamont. There, while waiting for Lamont to return from a service call, Mr. Otis describes how his wife threw him out of the house because she had dreamed that he stood on her needlepoint chair and trampled on some of her embroidery. After Lamont arrives and learns what has happened, he castigates his old uncle both for his erratic driving and his childlike marital conduct (although ironically Lamont, like Jesse Moran, is divorced). Mr. Otis's reply to Lamont, which comes at the approximate center of the novel, is so important that both men's speeches are worth quoting at length:

"You two act like quarrelsome children," Lamont told him.

"Well, at least I'm still married, you notice!" Mr. Otis said. "At least I'm still married, unlike certain others I could name!"

Ira said, "Well, at any rate—"

"Even worse than children," Lamont went on, as if he hadn't heard. "Children at least got the time to spare, but you two are old and coming to the end of your lives. Pretty soon one or the other of you going to die and the one that's left behind will say, 'Why did I act so ugly? That was who it was; that person was who I was with; and here we threw ourselves away on spitefulness,' you'll say."

"Well, it's probably going to be me that dies first,"

Mr. Otis said, "so I just ain't going to worry about that."

"I'm serious, Uncle?"

"I'm serious. Could be what you throw away is all that really counts; could be that's the whole point of things, wouldn't that be something? Spill it! Spill it all, I say! No way not to spill it. And anyhow, just look at the times we had. Maybe that's what I'll end up thinking. 'My, we surely did have us a time. We were a real knock-down, drag-out, heart-and-soul type of couple,' I'll say. Something to reflect on in the nursing home."

Lamont rolled his eyes heavenward.

Lamont doesn't understand his uncle's musings on the essential importance of appreciating the nonessential, apparently foolish or wasteful aspects of life, and during a first reading perhaps the reader also doesn't understand why Anne Tyler has "thrown away" the central portion of her novel on an episode apparently unrelated to the main plot and characters. (Random House's recent cassette-recording condensation of Breathing Lessons, read by Jill Eikenberry, omits the entire Mr. Otis episode.)

But the detour to Lamont's station is no more wasted than the "unsuccessful" lives of Maggie and Ira Moran. Breathing Lessons' irregular form, as well as its characters and events, is a warning against taking the games of life and of art too seriously, or more accurately, against trying to make all women and men and all artists play the same kind of game, devoted to achieving the same kind of goal. At the same time, of course, Anne Tyler is providing us with a game; she eschews the obvious tight plot or transparently coherent form in which important, organic developments neatly fall into place without too much effort from the reader, and provides us instead with an eccentric, episodic plot which invites us to experience and evaluate the chain of events not in the spirit of a tight artistic logic but of adventure, of creativity.

Thus the psychology and spirit of game-playing permeate Breathing Lessons, shaping its characters, events, themes, and basic form. And in its central concern with game-playing the novel explores the nature of art itself. Hans-Georg Gadamer has based a large part of his philosophy on the assumption that art is a kind of game; thus a literary work such as Breathing Lessons accomplishes its purposes by stimulating us to enter the playing field of its textual world. We become players, respond-ing to fictional events as though they were real. At the same time we are aware that the world of the novel is not real. Thus our experiences as readers both insulate us from the real world and its dangers and yet constantly draw on our experiences in that real world. Gadamer forcefully argues that we must never let the game-like apartness of a work of art, the discontinuity of our experiences of art from our everyday existences, tempt us to consider those experiences as purely aesthetic, unrelated to our understanding of the rest of our lives, or to the understanding of the culture that has shaped us.

In all of his discussions of the arts, Gadamer holds to both sides of the paradox that art, as a kind of game, is set apart from real life and at the same time vitally and necessarily related to actual existence. Concerning the first part of the paradox, he states: "Beautiful things are those whose value is of itself apparent. You cannot ask what purpose they serve. They are desirable for their own sake … and not, like the useful, for the sake of something else." But, again, there is always the emphasis that when one enters upon the playing-field of a work of art and gives oneself up to its game—"Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in his play"—the world of that work of art will reveal its structure to the participant. The result is an increase of knowledge, an Aristotelian "recognition" which has significant relationships to the reader's life:

The being of all play is always realisation, sheer fulfillment, energeia which has its telos within itself. The world of the work of art, in which play expresses itself fully in the unity of its course, is in fact a wholly transformed world. By means of it everyone recognises that that is how things are.

This paradox that the game of art is at the same time separated from real life and yet meaningfully related to our actual lives is obviously at work in the form of Breathing Lessons and in the fictional world revealed through that form. And as neither the novel's world nor ours is simple and unambiguous, the insight that we gain from the novel that "that is how things are" can not be reduced to a tidy little moral about the nature of happiness—or, for that matter, about the nature of Maggie Moran.

Near the end of the novel Maggie has severe doubts about her own basic character: perhaps her lack of practical sense has prevented her from accomplishing anything for those she loves. Immediately after her Fiona-and-Jesse reunion plot collapses, she has "a sudden view of her life as circular. It forever repeated itself, and it was entirely lacking in hope." And later that night, after describing to Ira another of her dreadful miscalculations which years before had badly embarrassed her friend Serena and Serena's ill, aged mother, Maggie comments, "I don't know why I kid myself that I'm going to heaven." At this point the reader might conclude that the textual world in which Maggie lives has thoroughly discredited any pretensions that either she or the reader has held that her character and her life should be viewed positively.

But another interpretation is possible. When Maggie contemplates her poor chances of getting into heaven, the reader might recall that during a Moran family trip to the Pimlico race track Maggie had advised (with what success isn't certain) the women of the family to bet on a horse named Infinite Mercy. Infinite mercy is, of course, what we all need from God if we are to get to heaven, and as much of it as possible from our fellow human beings, if we are to get through life. Further, Maggie's depressed mood clears away by the time she is ready for bed. She becomes quite cheerful again as she begins to generate another plot—which will be immediately shot down by Ira—to convince Fiona to send Leroy to live with them for the sake of Leroy's education, and she watches Ira enjoying his favorite game of solitaire:

He had passed that early, superficial stage when any number of moves seemed possible, and now his choices were narrower and he had to show real skill and judgment.

Similar to Ira's game, Ira's and Maggie's lives are now at a mature stage, and to play them out satisfactorily will demand their best efforts. Maggie's best efforts will involve her adapting her spirit of play, her vivid imagination, to human relationships as they really exist—to realize that her grown son and her almost grown daughter (not to mention her separated daughter-in-law and granddaughter) will be playing their own games, on their own fields, all unrelated to Maggie's own fantasies and desires. As part of this realization, Maggie must also more fully grasp what the author who created her has always (from her first novel, as a matter of fact) known: loving, understanding relationships between men and women are difficult to achieve, but they are possible; romance, however, is always an illusion. Occasionally, Maggie has realized this:

Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love? Why this preoccupation with first meetings, sad partings, honeyed kisses, heartbreak, when life was also full of children's births and trips to the shore and longtime jokes with friends?… It struck Maggie as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact.

But this kind of hard look at the shallowness of the rules and roles demanded of those who play at romance has been too unpleasant for Maggie to sustain. It is more typical of her to give way to the kind of sentimental, gushing emotions that caused her to sentimentalize Mr. Gabriel or to believe that even where Jesse and Fiona were concerned, love would conquer all:

Then Jesse wrapped his arms around [Fiona] and dropped his head to her shoulder, and something about that picture—his dark head next to her blond one—reminded Maggie of the way she used to envision marriage before she was married herself…. She had supposed that when she was married all her old problems would fall away…. And of course, she had been wrong. But watching Jesse and Fiona, she could almost believe that that early vision was the right one. She slipped into the house, shutting the screen door very softly behind her, and she decided everything was going to work out after all.

But, of course, it didn't.

This growing, painful realization of the futility of the sentimental aspects of her vision of life causes Maggie to exclaim despairingly, "Oh, Ira … what are we two going to live for, all the rest of our lives?" Ira embraces her, giving her the loving, supportive response that she needs:

"There, now, sweetheart," he said, and he settled her next to him. Still holding her close, he transferred a four of spades to a five, and Maggie rested her head against his chest and watched. He had arrived at the interesting part of the game by now, she saw. He had passed that early, superficial stage when any number of moves seemed possible, and now his choices were narrower and he had to show real skill and judgment. She felt a little stir of something that came over her like a flush, a sort of inner buoyancy, and she lifted her face to kiss the warm blade of his cheekbone. Then she slipped free and moved to her side of the bed, because tomorrow they had a long car trip to make and she knew she would need a good night's sleep before they started.

On this positive note the novel ends, and it is up to the reader to decide whether it is ironic (as I believe the optimistic final paragraph of Morgan's Passing is) or whether the text as a whole encour-agesus to believe that Maggie has gained enough insight, and that she and Ira share enough love, to continue their lives successfully. Of course, any growth Maggie experiences will certainly not involve her losing the spirit of play that lies at the core of her personality. For those like Maggie Moran and (as Tony Tanner pointed out) Elizabeth Bennet view life in much the way that the rest of us think of a game: it is there to be enjoyed. After all, one chooses to play a game; if one "plays" mainly out of a sense of duty or obligation then one's participation becomes mechanical and the essence of the game is destroyed. Of course, all aspects of life cannot be approached in the spirit of play. Jesse Moran and (again in Pride and Prejudice) Lydia Bennet do themselves and others a great deal of harm by not realizing this. And at times Maggie Moran also goes too far in "playing with" people's lives without their consent or knowledge. Most of the time, however, Maggie understands and honors the central relationships of life and the duties that belong to them. And when she does blunder and end up looking like a fool, her resulting fits of futility and self-loathing are soon swept away by her innate love of living, her underlying certainty that life is basically good and that the games she chooses to play are worth playing for their own sakes—not for the social and financial prizes that our popular materialistic culture awards to the winners of its favorite games. Maggie's wisdom clearly reveals to her (and to us) that the most important goals of life, loving relationships, are certainly not damaged or lost by one's possessing a joyful spirit.

What all of this amounts to, this peculiar mixture of optimism, futility, charity and irony which Breathing Lessons brings to a reader, will depend upon the total response to the text (and to his own life) of each reader. In spite of the apparently light, breezy nature of this novel, each reader will become aware, as he experiences his day with the Morans, that he, like Ira during that final game of solitaire, is being challenged, and as he advances in his solitary pursuit of the text his interpretive skill is increasingly important. For playing games of life and art to human beings is like friendship or marriage or even breathing. These activities come naturally to us, yet at times, as Maggie tries to convince the pregnant Fiona when they discuss childbirth classes, they demand all of our effort, all of our skill if we are going to successfully play our "natural" roles. As Maggie does with Fiona and Jesse, Anne Tyler can lure us into the game, and keep us playing until the end. However, Tyler, unlike Maggie, knows that when each reader decides, "That's how things are," the exact nature of "that" must be decided by the reader. In determining the final effect of a work of art, in contrast to the outcome of a competitive game, or one of Maggie's elaborate schemes, Anne Tyler knows that relinquishing ultimate control is the way in which an artist wins.

Source: Gene Koppel, "Maggie Moran, Anne Tyler's Madcap Heroine: A Game-Approach to Breathing Lessons," in Essays in Literature, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, Fall, 1991, pp. 276-87.

Elizabeth Beverly

In this excerpt, Beverly examines Tyler's characterization in Breathing Lessons.

Walking into the wide but comfortable expanse of an Anne Tyler novel can feel like settling down into a porch swing on a late summer evening. The neighbors on the porch next door begin to talk as the swing easily glides….

Imagine the ease of sitting in a porch swing and hearing not only the neighbors' conversation, but overhearing the minds of the neighbors as they sit in silence, unable or unwilling to speak, yearning to make sense of their particular lot.

The minds we overhear in Tyler's eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, belong to Maggie and Ira Moran on a late summer Saturday, as the middle-aged couple drive out of their ordinary suburban Baltimore life to the funeral of Maggie's best friend's husband in rural Pennsylvania. The trip to the mid-morning service should be easy enough, Ira should even be back in time to open his framing shop for afternoon business, but before departure, on page five, as Maggie drives out of the auto body shop, she hears a voice on the radio that sends her lurching into the street, into a new minor accident that seems to loosen everything: the previously intact fender, the past, hopes for the future, faith in her marriage, longing for the grandchild whom the couple haven't seen in years. Just as the car can't stay fixed, the day's tidy plans crumble, and a quest begins.

Breathing Lessons is the story of that quest, modest by the standards of imaginative literature, but deeply felt. As Maggie and Ira undertake this rather haphazard daylong journey, we realize from their cascading memories and hopes that they are both in search of nothing less than the meaning of family. But even as I write these words, I sense that I am making Tyler's novel sound much more earnest than it really is. In fact, the narrative ambles easily, delightfully, at times preposterously. The sure prose, the wonderful telling details, the concerns of busybody Maggie and silent, kind Ira create a world in which we can remain interested, intrigued perhaps, but undisturbed….

Should this bother us? Does the novelist owe the reader a kick in the pants? Should a reviewer criticize a gifted novelist for seeming to refuse the high moral charge of art? No, no, and no! But what about the characters whose lives we've followed so faithfully? What does the novelist owe them? Should they exist simply for our amusement and then be put cozily to bed at day's end before the novelist has even begun to engage in the heartfelt pain they've expressed?

There are no answers to these questions, but if it occurs to a reader to raise such questions at all, to imagine that characters are trapped by the very form that creates them, then we're in the presence of an oddly skewed work, one which raises expectations it has no intention of meeting. The problem is not that the book veers to whimsy, but more that the easy, whimsical tone creates a false sense of peace and thereby devalues the actual longing which rips through the hearts of the characters for whom we care.

I believe that the skewing begins with the conceptualization of Maggie, in whose mind we ride throughout two of the three major sections of the novel. As soon as we meet her on her unsteady way to the body shop, we suspect we shall like her. As soon as we meet her, we learn to laugh with her and at her….

Chunky little Maggie wheels right through the day; she's more scatterbrained than eccentric, more endearing than downright lovable, more "inventive" than simply dishonest. We stick with her because she's funny, always on the verge of amazement, and takes herself half seriously. But not seriously enough, if we're to believe Ira. And we do believe Ira. By the time we are allowed into Ira's head, we find that "he loved her, but he couldn't stand how she refused to take her own life seri-ously. She seemed to believe it was sort of a practice life, something she could afford to play around with as if they offered second and third chances to get it right."

Ira's insight evolves from his conviction that human life is full of waste, particularly poignant since Ira's youthful ambition to become a doctor was swallowed years earlier by the obligations he assumed for his family, not only for Maggie and their children, but also for his weak father and two dependent sisters, one developmentally disabled, the other emotionally so. The fact that Ira's section occupies the physical center of the novel seems to be no accident. The more sober of the two main characters, he provides the weight to hold the narrative on course. Or he ought to. But the novel itself is Maggie's own crazily conceived course. She is the one who sees what to do, where to go, proceeds through the day and, we suspect, through life, with the only authority this family knows.

This authority gets her into trouble, makes her appear ridiculous: to Ira, to her children, to us. About her kindly meant deceptions, Ira asserts, "It's Maggie's weakness: She believes it's all right to alter people's lives. She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her view of them."

Certain novelists could be described in the same way as Maggie, but I suspect that Tyler agrees with Ira about the suitability of such imaginative whim. I think she believes that the lives she has invented for Maggie and Ira are simply what they are. There is no changing them. It's as if Maggie, Tyler's creation, has more faith in herself and in the world than Tyler herself does. Tyler's world, full of the wonders of language and the tenacity of hope, is an insistently secular world. During the course of the novel, we sit through a funeral designed to make a widow feel better, a wedding rehearsal, a film of a wedding, some choir practice, a few moments in church. But nothing sacred disturbs the quality of these lives. It's no surprise that Maggie's longing for family union seems at moments almost monstrous. There is no promise of any greater union than that expressed in amicable silence….

And so the novel closes with Ira playing solitaire on his side of the bed, and Maggie settling down on her side of the bed. Perhaps Tyler wants us to believe this cozy separation is happiness, that Maggie's ambition is unrealistic, therefore laughable. Perhaps she wants us to recognize that com-fort doesn't depend upon how such a day ultimately turns out, but upon the fact that such a day can happen at all, that past, future, and present can occasionally stream through us all at once, and make life appear full and rich and possible.

If this is the case, then it is a mercy that Maggie can so simply close down and go to sleep. But I feel bad that by the end of Maggie's novel I can take her no more seriously than Ira or even Tyler. For she is a neighbor who would want to make my life better if she could, if only I could let her words reach me, disturb me, wake me from my nightlong, easy swing.

Source: Elizabeth Beverly, "The Tidy Plans That Crumbled," in Commonweal, Vol. CXVI, No. 4, February 24, 1989, pp. 120-21.

Robert Towers

In the following excerpt, Towers focuses on the unconventional qualities in Breathing Lessons.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Robert Towers, "Roughing It," in New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXV, No. 17, November 10, 1988, pp. 40-41.

Hope Hale Davis

Davis compares some of Tyler's other works to Breathing Lessons in this passage.

Up to now Tyler has given us irresistible "idiosyncratic characters who amble about in Chekhovian fashion," as a reviewer of The Clock Winder described them. Fantastic as these endearing oddballs may be, the world they live in is no never-never-land. Unequipped to manage in it, they can sometimes be saved by meeting the right unlikely person. We exult in the happy ending, which seems almost too good to be true. And indeed it may be. An amazingly bountiful one is offered Jeremy, the preoccupied artist who strives to cope with real-life demands in Celestial Navigation, but it is taken away again, through simple and unbearable human misunderstanding. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Ezra tries time after time to put on a festive family reunion, but concludes in the end, "I really, honestly believe I missed some rule that everyone else takes for granted; I must have been absent from school that day."

The readers who so quickly made Breathing Lessons a best seller must have expected some similar memorably loving hero. They had recently read The Accidental Tourist, laughing while taking in its message (running like a warm undercurrent through all the earlier works) that nobody can be too offbeat to win some discerning soul. Looking forward to her next novel with such anticipation, have they been a little let down by Breathing Lessons? Here the eccentrics are only minor characters acting in small comic set pieces along the way, not moving spirits like James in Tin Can Tree or Morgan in Morgan's Passing, who spends not only his life but even his pseudo-death impersonating.

For all its incidental flashes of inspiration and comedy, [Breathing Lessons] gave me a sense of slackening, even of retreat. It opens, in fact, with a stale, statistically way-off male chauvinist cliché. In a farcical scene where Tyler's humor is surprisingly labored, Maggie retrieves the car from the body shop that has just repaired the latest of her crumplings, and (distracted by a voice on a call-in radio show that she thinks is her daughter-in-law's) promptly heads out into the path of a passing truck.

The sexist slander becomes worse: Maggie makes an irresponsible escape, and then within minutes is pretending to search in her hopeless handbag for a map she doesn't dare admit she has left at home. (This is an almost identical repeat of a scene in Searching for Caleb.) A few miles farther on, at a stop for a snack, to the distress of Ira, Maggie confides to the café waitress a detailed family history. Though she sometimes slips out of character and exposes the brain of her author, here Maggie is exactly what her husband calls her, a whiffle-head.

Tyler clearly is no feminist, seeing half of humanity good and the other half villainous. This is mostly a virtue, except that female subjugation is merely one of the monstrous social facts and threats of which Tyler has seemed virtually oblivious throughout her writing. In Breathing Lessons Maggie prevents Fiona's abortion at a clinic where patients are harassed by a mob of Right-to-Lifers, whose behavior and dubious propaganda show Tyler as close as she has ever come to taking a social position. Yet Maggie is there for strictly personal reasons, preoccupied by the fibs she must tell to make sure her grandchild will be born. Tyler presents a black in this novel, but only in one of her comic divertissements, and he is a sweetly subservient oldtimer with an IQ of 50.

The lives of Tyler's characters, including the better-educated ones, are affected solely by other individuals. She does know that when they make up a family, the change is qualitative, the family group becomes a force, sometimes malign. She demonstrates this so well that she captures—yes, capti-vates—us within her smaller world. What she reveals is how rare and precious goodness is, in man or woman, how fragile its carriers. And how someone of either sex can be an exploiter, or a victim, for reasons that are more complex than gender.

Breathing Lessons is mainly Maggie's story, but she is presented as a questionable heroine. Maddening as Ira's withholding can be (it has crushed the development of his son), Tyler shows his life of quiet sacrifice, running his father's framing shop to support his inadequate sisters. For a few brief minutes she takes us into his mind:

He was fifty years old and had never accomplished one single act of consequence. Once he had planned to find a cure for some major disease and now he was framing petit point.

He is as disappointed in his over-achieving daughter heading toward Ivy-land as in his underachieving son, a failing rock singer much like Drumstrings Casey, the anti-hero of A Slipping-Down Life. We see Maggie also from Ira's painful point of view:

He loved her, but he couldn't stand how she refused to take life seriously. She seemed to believe it was a sort of practice life, something she could afford to play around with as if offered second and third chances to get it right. She was always making clumsy, impetuous rushes toward nowhere in particular—side trips, random detours.

Actually, what Maggie is trying to get right on the day of this story is their current life. With the unwilling Ira she carries out a scheme meant to end the separation of their son from his wife and retrieve the lost relationship with Leroy, the granddaughter. Maggie's campaign is Tyleresque, precipitating unexpected comedy. But it involves a problem that is far from comic, one Tyler's characters have struggled with before: Do you dare to take action that affects the course of other people's lives?

In Celestial Navigation a spinster who rooms in hapless Jeremy's house overcomes her inhibition and takes a step that permits the happy turn of events, yet can't bring herself to intervene again, thus letting it fail. In Searching for Caleb Justine tries to get the 17-year-old daughter to ride in the U-Haul truck with her father, whom the girl can't forgive for this restless move that is wrenching her away from her school only months before graduation. Justine castigates her own lack of tact or subtlety: "She never would let a quarrel wind up in its natural way…. She always had to be interfering."

Meddling is by no means the ruling theme in Tyler's novels, however. Within the limits she has set herself, watching ordinary people anyone might meet, she has also set a goal—the goal of all great writers—to show that even the most infuriating of humans, closely observed, from within and without, can become important, essential, precious. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Ezra is faithfully taking care of his difficult mother who has alienated her other sons and daughters. Blind and lonely, she requires him to read aloud from her old diaries. I can't remember encountering a more poignant scene than the one in which he reads an entry revealing her ecstasy and promise at age 18.

So perceptive is Tyler's ear that within their context inarticulate responses like "I see," "Not at all," or "Huh?" can carry deep foreboding. We feel a sense of irreparable loss from a quiet voice saying, "Oh."

Not all Tyler's effects come from hints and auguries. She allows her characters sudden rare conclusions, direct and sweeping. During one flashback in Breathing Lessons Maggie recalls the widow Serena as a highly practical bride, buying a wedding dress that could be dyed purple to wear later, and considering whether she could rent (like a bartender) a man to stand in for her unknown father. When Maggie protests at her lack of romanticism about the groom Serena says calmly, "Of course I love him. But I've loved other people as much. I loved Terry Simpson in our sophomore year—remember him? But it wasn't time to get married then, so Terry is not the one I'm marrying."

Tyler permits a pause for reflection, then continues: "So there again, Serena had managed to color Maggie's view of things. 'We're not in the hands of fate after all,' she seemed to be saying. 'Or if we are, we can wrest ourselves free any time we care to.'"

True or false? This may be Tyler's mischievous game.

Source: Hope Hale Davis, "Watching Over the Ordinary People," in New Leader, Vol. LXXI, No. 20, November 28, 1988, pp. 19-21.

Richard Eder

Eder considers Breathing Lessons as Tyler's "funniest book," although perhaps "not her best" in the following review.

No Olympian or high-flying view for Anne Tyler's art and the people it invents. She is a low-flyer, a crop-duster, zooming in at head-height and lifting hats; skimming the ordinary because it provides certain essential kinds of humanity, sometimes catching a wing tip on it or blowing its dust into her engine; and finally, with all the risks, accomplishing a gleeful astonishment.

Her people are arrayed in comic eccentricity. But Tyler waives the preservative chill customary to such a thing. They perform as close as possible to life temperature. They are soft, sometimes too soft.

In almost any Tyler novel there are moments when the reader worries about the low altitude, wonders whether the humor and sentiment are getting perilously close to shtick, suspects that the characters are becoming so comfortable in their quirks as to forfeit movement.

It is Tyler's idiosyncratic form of authority. She gives her people no freedom to be anything but themselves. She never stops imagining them or listening for their possibilities. Sometimes she can't hear them and improvises—we sense a kind of shuffling—but it's not long before they are back in her ken and under orders: Your soil will not change; grow in it. Grow any way you want.

And how they grow. Breathing Lessons turns a fraying middle-class household into a mixture of picture palace and puzzle palace; a familiar place made new.

It is set in the 28-year marriage of Maggie and Ira Moran and told in the course of a day trip from their Baltimore home to the funeral of the husband of an old school friend. The marriage is the soil I mentioned, more thin than fertile, and seared by dry spells.

The story is about what grows there: a man and a woman who are two versions of the human condition, two different stories in the same story, like the old tales in which a father sends two children out in opposite directions to seek their fortunes and misfortunes. But Ira and Maggie are never apart. It is their opposite spirits that make their common life a painful, provident slog for the one; and a painful, cloudy passage of dragons and treasures for the other.

We start with what in another author's hands might be two stock figures. Ira is careful and methodical and conceals his warmth beneath a mystique of competence; Maggie is emotional, impulsive, interfering and sloppy.

Each is in a kind of mid-life anguish; Ira, because he gave up his hopes of being a doctor to run the family picture-framing business on behalf of his half-invalid father and two sisters; Maggie, because her two children are grown up and her granddaughter lives with her son's former wife.

Maggie's stock figure is only a starting point. When a friend counsels Maggie to learn to let go, she retorts: "I don't feel I'm letting go. I feel they're taking things from me." In her quixotic and farfetched efforts to fight life's depredations; and in the repercussions these have on Ira's effortful equanimity, we get not only some of Tyler's most exuberant humor but two of her most moving and penetrating portraits.

The trip to Deer Lick, Pa., begins as it is to continue—in a comedy that, based as it is on a mixture of misadventure, misapprehension and unre-generate originality, is invariably a comedy of character.

Dressed to the nines, but already beginning to come unfastened, Maggie picks up the family car at the auto body shop. Hitting the accelerator instead of the brake, she has her fender mashed by a passing truck. Maggie, and everything she possesses or attempts, will always have dents….

Eventually, [she and Ira] get to the funeral. Serena, the widow, has arranged it to be a replay of her youth and that of her former classmates. Each is assigned to sing one of the pop songs of their day; later, at the reception, a movie of her wedding is shown. The sequence is a remarkable blend of farce and poignancy beneath which we are made to feel the bareness of time and its dwindling choices.

The funeral scenes are intercut with the recollection of Maggie's and Ira's courtship, a phenomenon largely precipitated by another chain of Maggie's misapprehensions and impulses. It was a successful chain, as it happened….

There are moments when Maggie's klutziness seems overloaded, when she is just too funny and inept. But they are minor defects in a portrait that is triumphant because Tyler neither judges Maggie and Ira nor indulges them. Comedy of her sort is the supreme form of kindness; it brings out an extraordinary depth of feeling.

Maggie and Ira—whose portrait is more sparing but equally vivid and compassionate—are not heroes, but they are, in a sense, heroic. It is the heroism of enduring. Each does a number of unforgivable things, but in a marriage that lasts, forgiveness is not the point. Going on to the next day is.

Breathing Lessons may not be Tyler's best book; it is not a comparison I am easy with. The flashbacks sometimes slow down her matchless way with the present tense. The softness is sometimes too noticeable.

On the other hand, it may be her funniest book. Maggie's extraordinary encounter with an old black motorist whose flamboyant disassociations outbid her own is one of the funniest sustained sequences of contemporary writing that I can think of. And there are moments when the struggle among Maggie, Ira, and the melancholy of time passing forms a fiery triangle more powerful and moving, I think, than anything she has done.

Source: Richard Eder, "Crazy for Sighing and Crazy for Loving You," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 11, 1988, p. 3.

Sources

Bennett, Barbara A., review, in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 60, No. 1, January, 1995, pp. 57-75.

Eder, Richard, "Trying on a New Life," in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 7, 1995, p. 3.

Hall Petry, Alice, "Bright Books of Life: The Black Norm in Anne Tyler's Novels," in The Southern Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1, Fall, 1992, pp. 7-13.

Koppel, Gene, "Maggie Moran, Anne Tyler's Madcap Heroine: A Game-Approach to Breathing Lessons," in Essays in Literature, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, Fall, 1991, pp. 276-87.

Rowe Willrich, Patricia, "Watching Through Windows: A Perspective on Anne Tyler," in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 68, No. 3, Summer, 1992, pp. 497-516.

For Further Study

Bail, Paul, Anne Tyler: A Critical Companion, Greenwood Press, 1998.

Not only does Bail provide a survey of the plots, structures, characters, and themes of Tyler's novels, he also offers a comprehensive biography.

Croft, Robert W., An Anne Tyler Companion, Greenwood Press, 1998.

An A-Z guide of characters in Tyler's fiction, as well as brief summaries of her novels, essays, and short stories.

Voelker, Joseph C., Art and the Accidental in Anne Tyler, University of Missouri Press, 1989.

Voelker explores the role of accident in Tyler's fiction.