Mick Hartley

Norm posted a few days back in praise of Anne Tyler. I too am a fan. I've read most of her books. I don't have a tally of which books of hers that I've read, though - and therein lies the problem. I had the strange and somewhat embarrassing experience a year or so back of picking up one of her novels – Back When We Were Grownups – and reading a good third of the way into it before realising that I'd actually read it before. What makes it worse is that it's a relatively recent book, published in 2001, so it can't have been more than four or five years at the very most since I'd read it the first time.

How could I do that? Is my memory so bad? Probably yes, though I think in general it's true that we forget a great deal of we read. Re-reading, I'm often amazed at how little I recall from the first time. But I think there was something else, part of that general feeling of "women's literature" in general and Anne Tyler in particular, that played a part. The thing is, Tyler's books are on the whole - if you want to look at it like that – quite similar. Just as, in their own way, Jane Austen's books are all quite similar. They're usually set in Baltimore (Tyler's books, not Austen's); the protagonists tend to be solidly middle class, settled, with children, and beginning to wonder quite what happened to the young people that they used to be. Without quite realising it they've drifted into a comfortable late middle age, and something seems, well, maybe to have got lost along the way, though quite what it might be and where or why it got lost they're not at all sure.

So, I started reading the book with that in mind. And, naturally, my preconceptions were confirmed. Well, I thought, here we go again: another bittersweet tale about lost dreams: decent people soldiering on, doing their best because, really what else can one do?….yet, wondering, was there some moment, some decision that was made way back when, which decided how life turned out? And did they maybe make the wrong choice? Yes, I thought: it's good, it's well written, it's psychologically acute, but – it's so circumscribed, so Anne Tyler. She's done it before. And isn't that, perhaps, typical of so much women's writing? It's all very well done – but isn't it rather domestic? Does it perhaps lack some ambition? It's not exactly War and Peace, is it?

Because, I now realise, there is, or was for me, an ever-so-slight tinge of guilt in reading Anne Tyler. It slips down so smoothly. It's the easy-reading break between the heavy-duty experimental novels – it's only at the end that you realise it was all a fantasy in the mind of a catatonic dwarf in a hospital in Montevideo - or the searing indictements of our consumerist culture. Mostly written by men.

There's a kind of squaring of the shoulders and a clenching of the jaw when you start these male books. Yeah, come on then, whaddya got? I ain't scared. So it's written in the voice of a dyslexic junkie? Contains scenes of bestiality and necrophilia? No problem; I can handle it. You're dealing with a guy here, I don't mind saying, who's read all of William Burroughs; a man who's devoured with relish Georges Perec's La Disparition (well, the English translation by Gilbert Adair), his novel with no letter e. De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom sits happily on my bookshelves between Proust and Philip K Dick. So come on then, try and shock me; try and baffle me; try and intimidate me: it's not going to work.

With Anne Tyler there are no great life and death struggles, no cliff-hanging denouements, no page-turning car chases, no shattering glimpses into the lives of psychopathic child-killers, or heart-wrenching tales of starving Chinese factory workers, no hand-wringing meditations of the meaning of it all. It's about ordinary people, like, well, like you or me.

I started Back When We Were Grownups with that in the back of my mind. It was another Anne Tyler book. Yes, it's Baltimore again; yes, it's a middle-aged woman holding things together, again. Yes she's looking after the slightly dotty grandad again. Yes, she starts to think about her first boyfriend, again. Um, hold on.

I spent the next 10 or 20 pages barely able to acknowledge that I could be so stupid as to get this far in a book I'd only read a few years before without being aware of the fact. But it was undeniable. I put the book down. Of course I could have gone on to finish the thing, but by now it had all come back – and anyway, I felt rather foolish.

Any lessons in all this? I don't know, but I'm reminded that I really should re-read War and Peace. At least with that I know for sure that I've read it once. Can't remember a thing about it though.