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The Amateur Marriage: A Novel

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Author: Anne Tyler
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Category: Book

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Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

189 reviews
Sales Rank: 275456

Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 6.9 x 4.3 x 1.2

ISBN: 0345472454
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780345472458
ASIN: 0345472454

Publication Date: January 31, 2006
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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage is not so much a novel as a really long argument. Michael is a good boy from a Polish neighborhood in Baltimore; Pauline is a harum-scarum, bright-cheeked girl who blows into Michael's family's grocery store at the outset of World War II. She appears with a bloodied brow, supported by a gaggle of girlfriends. Michael patches her up, and neither of them are ever the same. Well, not the same as they were before, but pretty much the same as everyone else. After the war, they live over the shop with Michael's mother till they've saved enough to move to the suburbs. There they remain with their three children, until the onset of the sixties, when their eldest daughter runs away to San Francisco. Their marriage survives for a while, finally crumbling in the seventies. If this all sounds a tad generic, Tyler's case isn't helped by the characteristics she's given the two spouses. Him: repressed, censorious, quiet. Her: voluble, emotional, romantic. Mars, meet Venus. What marks this couple, though, and what makes them come alive, is their bitter, unproductive, tooth-and-nail fighting. Tyler is exploring the way that ordinary-seeming, prosperous people can survive in emotional poverty for years on end. She gets just right the tricks Michael and Pauline play on themselves in order to stay together: "How many times," Pauline asks herself, "when she was weary of dealing with Michael, had she forced herself to recall the way he'd looked that first day? The slant of his fine cheekbones, the firming of his lips as he pressed the adhesive tape in place on her forehead." Only in antogonism do Michael and Pauline find a way to express themselves. --Claire Dederer

Product Description
From the inimitable Anne Tyler, a rich and compelling novel about a mismatched marriage—and its consequences, spanning three generations.

They seemed like the perfect couple—young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother’s grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.

Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable.

From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more fully into the complex entanglements of family life in this wise, embracing, and deeply perceptive novel.

From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews: Read 184 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Lives In Time October 6, 2008
For me, The Amateur Marriage represents the sixth time I have read one of Anne Tyler's novels. On the surface it's the story of Michael and Pauline. They meet by chance in 1941 in Anton's, the grocery store run by Michael's family. 1941, perhaps incidentally, is the year Anne Tyler was born.

There was a war to be fought, of course, a war that affected both of their lives. But there's a marriage, and a child, a daughter named Lindy. Others follow, a boy and another girl. For Michael and Pauline, life progresses, as does their marriage. But twists and turns take them to places they have never visited.

As with other novels by Anne Tyler, there is an obvious and consistent linearity about its time. A reviewer has to be careful with detail, because what happens to this novel's characters is a large part of how it happens, and thus an integral part of the book's rationale. To some extent, a listing of the plot, event by event, would render a reading unnecessary. But after a handful of Anne Tyler's books, I am now convinced there is much more going on in them than mere story-telling.

In the past I have found her characters shallow, rather self-obsessed, selfish, perhaps. They are people who have lives outside the family, but people who seem pre-occupied with the familiar and seem rarely to confront ideas or experience outside its apparently defining, but only sometimes
reassuring confines.

And perhaps that's the point. It is an American dream, a libertarian ideal under a microscope. It is analysed, picked apart, sometimes reconstructed. The characters are affected by political, social, economic and cultural change. Their lives are materially transformed by the same forces that lay waste and occasionally reinvent their home town, Baltimore. But they, themselves, are mere recipients of these effects, appearing to play no part in their instigation or, it seems, their analysis. They live their lives. They are pushed around by experience, jostled by life, reflect little, internalise everything, only occasionally recognising life's potential to reform. Time thus moves on. Inevitability looms unexpectedly.

It is not a criticism of Anne Tyler, her novel or its characters to proffer the opinion that everything seems to happen in an intellectual wasteland. People go to college, do law degrees, become involved with good causes, procreate, but moments of reflection seem to be confined to what breed of dog might not provoke allergy. Perhaps that's the point. Such things are the stuff of life. Time goes on.

5 out of 5 stars

A highly imperfect union September 2, 2008
You can easily imagine that Tyler's first title was "Immature Marriage" but being a wordsmith, the more interesting title (and concept)emerged. (Amateur is a word from the Latin, which means "to love.") And, the umbrella question of the whole book is whether this is love... is it passion, is it filling in the blanks of one's personality and abilities, is it a societal acceptable married front, is it compatibilty, is it the ability to raise children by inches from infancy to a legal age? The couple portrayed, Micheal and Pauline, are both capable of intense passion (positive and negative)and they raised children but it seems to me that the story is about two people incapable of love. Yet that idea never occurs to them and they assume that what they have together must be love. Tyler's writing is incredible; her use of language and her insights and comparables are just so impressive; the quirkiness in events and personalities is pure genius. I liked the layout of the book as it progressed through 60 years; each chapter you must get your bearings as to what part of life this is and what everyone is up to. It was a splendid mix of fine writing, storytelling events and psychology. Loved it.

Both characters, husband and wife, were competent in their own ways, but deeply incompetent as a parental unit, to run a family and ultimately the intensity of their relationship became an increasing negative. Interestingly, the husband, Micheal, took action only when he realized that only his wife Pauline, and himself were excitedly and delightedly recapping their dramatic fights as their only stories at their 30th wedding anniversary party; their adult children were neither delighted nor amused. It was such a censoring "rear view mirror" moment that crystallized the problem and precipitated Micheal's immediate departure from the marriage. One is left to wonder if he just wanted out of the blame and by being the one who initiated the divorce it was one of those "when you are being ridden out of town on a rail try to get out in front and make it look like a parade" moments.

Both individuals were portrayed as underdeveloped and flawed; sometimes a marriage fits to the extent that one person's weakeness is supported by the spouse's strengths. But in this case, each had similar weaknesses that created a serious problem for the development of the children; they both loved drama (although the husband, Micheal didn't think he did) said and did hurtful and antagonistic things to each other; they were both sexually inappropriate, including overt seductiveness in front of the children and "bedroom activities" with children aware of what was going on around their children; they fought viciously and behaved in vile passive-aggressive ways in front of the children. Pauline was so boundary-less that she would have had an affair in an instant-with three children and a husband in the home- and was stopped because of a random phone call.

Micheal wearied of the running gun battle after 30 years and suddenly divorced Pauline, and he married an opposite type, an unexciting, undramatic, unimaginative and self-contained plain woman, Anne, who is psychologically flat, extremely even. While at first the enormous relief was a source of attraction to Micheal, (drama/intensity fatigue) but the second marriage is flawed for him and never becomes as important to Micheal as the first marriage. Anne is the least likable person of the book, toadlike and unable to be talked into or convinced of anything or taking other's needs into consideration. Her boundaries were so far afield and hun-like defensed that she could not be healing or much of anything but a sterile companion, content with being blameless.

The interesting thing here is to look at the singular entity both marriages created. The first was a vigorous two headed creature either snarling or kissing, with sexual passion in its arterial system and bitter bile in its veneous. The second marriage was a half-hearted calcified creature with tap water circulating. Micheal becomes a sympathetic personality at the same moment you realize how avoidant and evasive of blame he is and how underdeveloped he is, understandable with his overburdened sorrowful childhood and overburdened frenetic life from young adulthood through most of his life. As a matter of fact, it becomes apparent that he is neither good nor bad, just confused and undeveloped.

The unrecognized surprise to Micheal was that he craved the intimacy and passion that an explosive unstable personality, female beauty and naked dependence created; life was deadly set before he met Pauline and somewhat like that after he left her, especially after her death. One is left with the impression that he left his colorless life with his widowed and depressed mother (who lost a son and a husband) to marry an unstable and vivacious woman and then when he got tired of that (describing his life with Pauline as "hell" after 30 years) or didn't want to be associated with being 1/2 of a destructive parenting team, divorced her and went once again to a life with the polar extreme of a colorless and unchallenging woman who saw him as "dessert," in other words not necessary to her life. In short, she didn't really appear to have the ability to give anything essential to the relationship to create a bonded couple happiness; she was kind of a quid pro quo gal.

Interestingly, Pauline and Micheal raised their grandson better than their children, probably because they divorced when the grandson was young. When they were married their dual drama was their priority; the children were damaged by witnessing the drama-both the fighting and sexualization of the household, wild instability, and emotional neglect. The oldest child was completly destroyed and ran away; the damage to the other two went underground and affected them deeply as well. This kind of nuanced storytelling feels honest. It rang true that neither Micheal nor Pauline considered that their loose behavior and lack of real love was the cause of their oldest child becoming an addict and a run-away or that the other children were also damaged albeit more subtly. When the oldest child returns decades later after Pauline died, her comments that her parents were ice and glass, similar agents, equally destructive to children growing up came as an absolute shock to Micheal. It was also shocking to him when his grandson named his daughter Pauline and when the family had good memories and stories about Pauline, but not him; no doubt this character, Micheal, was based on a real life personality who assumed that the more overt personality in the couple could be pointed to as the sole source of the family's problem, especially as he was the one who initiated the divorce. The shock to him was that he wasn't perceived as "the good guy" or a victim (of Pauline) by his children; he wasn't able to understand or escape the fact that to them he was one of two adults partnering a deeply destructive parental unit.

I thought it the passage of time was interesting - 60 years of Americana; the writerly details were incredible. This book was nuanced in detail of each era, which made for good reading. You can imagine how psychologically unsophisticated things were in an immigrant neighborhood in 1940s Baltimore. Micheal and Pauline were immature unbalanced abberations of a psychologically unsophisticated time; their highly imperfect union was fueled by something that was assumed to be amare (love); the evidence that it was not love was chronicled by the damage to their offspring.

5 out of 5 stars

ONE OF THE BETTER BOOKS I HAVE EVER READ September 2, 2008
I AM AMAZED AT ANNE TYLER'S ABILITY TO PRESENT EVERDAY LIFE WITH SUCH INSIGHT. THERE IS NO INTRICATE PLOT HERE-JUST THE UPS AND DOWNS OF AN ORDINARY MARRIAGE OVER A LIFE SPAN BETWEEN TWO VERY OPPOSITE MINDED PEOPLE.MOST MARRIAGES CAN THRIVE AND GROW IN SUCH AN ATMOSPHERE BUT OBVIOUSLY MANY CANNOT. THIS IS A BOOK THAT WILL STAY WITH ME FOR SOME TIME.

3 out of 5 stars

Wasted Days July 9, 2008
I cannot remember reading a more depressing novel (and I just finished The Kite Runner). The Amateur Marriage is very well written except for some style inconsistencies that bothered me but, because the story is so "small," it would be a difficult film treatment. What they should make is a movie of the reviewers' marriages who have described this story as "delightful." What must they be like?

The pace of the book is unique, in which years are cleverly rolled out in a way that make you wonder what happenbed to them... just like real life! Tyler jumps ahead decade by decade and clues the reader in using subtle current event hints that further illustrate how detached Michael and Pauline were from their own "real lives". I couldn't see either life as anything but a series of wasted, undocumented days that filled the unwritten chapters in between.

Throughout this novel you'll want to scream at the characters to "step back!", "simplify!", "communicate!" In the end, I was so glad for my own marriage and family that I demonstrated it, so, I guess you could say, this novel changed me in a good way.

5 out of 5 stars

So familiar, so comforting May 19, 2008
I absolutely loved "The Amateur Marriage." It was the third of Tyler's novels I've read, and by far the best. As with all her novels, the characters are so fully realized as to seem like they're members of your own family, but what makes "Marriage" excel is that the plot is strong as well. I tore through this book because I felt invested in the lives of Pauline, Michael, and their friends and family, and I especially could not wait for the resolution of the Lindy drama (I'm being vague here so as not to spoil it for anyone). Some of the characters reminded me of my own relatives, which could be part of why I found the novel so compelling. I highly recommend "Marriage" to Tyler fans, and it's also an excellent starting title for those new to Tyler. Truly a gem of a novel.

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