It was a Saturday afternoon in April, chilly, and two of my
friends from the George Mason MFA program
were visiting here in Columbus .
Naturally, after showing them the ridiculous corn field sculpture in Dublin
(see picture), we stopped in at the Village Bookshop, a bookstore in an old
church with overstock books at cheap prices. We hatched a plan: the four of us
(my husband joined in) drew names and we each had to select and purchase a book
for that person which he/she would then be obligated to read. We agreed not to
choose a book that would waste the person’s time (hence Jimmy Buffet’s short
story collection Tales from Margaritaville remained on the shelf), and
after more than five years of reading one another’s writing, we knew each
other’s taste enough to know what would be worthwhile.
I lucked out. The
friend who drew my name chose for me Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist.
I had not read Anne Tyler before, but I soon found myself
drawn into the world of Macon Leary, the “accidental tourist,” whose life is
falling apart in the wake of his son’s death and his wife’s subsequent request
for divorce. Emotionally reserved,
If you haven’t read Accidental Tourist, be forewarned
that it is the type of book that will make you linger long over your lunchtime
reading, or stay up too late turning pages. Not that it’s overly suspenseful,
although you can’t help being invested in the characters and wanting to know
what will happen next—it’s more that the world Tyler draws is both entertaining
and real in the way that the greatest comedies of manners are. The characters
are quirky, but they never veer into caricatures, just as the many emotions of
the book—love, frustration, grief—are expertly managed so that the book is
never maudlin or broody or despairing.
Successful comedies of manners are not easy to come by
today. They belong more to the
moralistic and “mannered” societies of the 18th and 19th
century. But to imagine that we do not have “manners” in contemporary society
is a delusion that Accidental Tourist clearly dispels, as does Helen
Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, which I blogged about previously. In fact, the two books share many similarities—a close,
third-person point of view of a male protagonist; a tone that at once invites
us to laugh at the protagonist’s limitations even as it respects that same
character’s struggles; and an overall effect of perfectly managing the narrative
so that it avoids unattractive extremes of satire or sentimentality. And both
are books that manage, miraculously, to be that perfect blend of being fun to
read while still offering substance that stays with the reader after the last
page is turned.
Our afternoon at the Village Bookshop had a happy ending for
all of us. One of my writer friends went
home with a collection of short stories by Peter Ho Davies, while the other
ended up with Joseph Heller’s Picture This. I happened to draw my husband’s name, and
while I considered making him read Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood
because I myself would like to read it and have someone to discuss it with, I
ultimately selected a book I thought might be more to his taste: the Booker
Prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, about an
Australian outlaw. And I think I can safely say we all went home with a sense
of thankfulness at having friends who know our literary selves!
