Tag Archives: marriage

#BookReview ‘Ladder of Years’ by Anne Tyler #contemporary #family

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Ladder of Years is another fine character-led drama by Anne Tyler, one of my favourite authors. It is the story of Delia Grinstead who, in a moment of dissatisfaction with her life and relationships, goes for a walk on the beach and keeps on walking. Finding a niche in a small town, with hardly any money and possessions, Delia starts again. And when her family catch up with her and ask her why she left, she cannot find a way to explain. It is twenty-eight years since Ladder of Years was first published. It was chosen by Time magazine as one of the ten best books of 1995. Tyler had already been a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1986 with The Accidental Tourist and won it in 1989 for Breathing Lessons. All her novels stand the test of time and can be read as if the action takes place today, so accurately is her finger on the portrayal of human emotion.
Adrift from her husband and three almost-adult children in Baltimore and not understanding why, Delia finally tips over the edge while on holiday. She finds herself in Bay Borough, the sort of small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business. She finds a job and a room to rent, buys a couple of secondhand work dresses and a nifty gadget to heat water in a cup so she can make an early morning cup of tea. Delia knows she should let her family know she is safe but is disinclined to do so, feeling she has been taken for granted. Inevitably, one of her sisters arrives on the doorstep. What follows is the story of a woman free for the first time, having married as a teenager and worked all that time as her doctor husband’s receptionist. Free from the expectations of others, she makes a circle of friends on her own terms.
This is a novel about middle-aged stasis and escape, about admitting the truth of one’s own life, choices and possibilities, and that there are no easy answers. Tyler’s characters are always so well-drawn and believable and her observations so wise and true, sometimes uncomfortably so. Here’s an example; ‘Didn’t it often happen, she thought, that aged parents die exactly at the moment when other people (your husband, your adolescent children) have stopped being thrilled to see you coming? But a parent is always thrilled, always dwells so lovingly on your face as you are speaking. One of life’s many ironies.’ Of course, Delia encounters other parent/child combinations in Bay Borough which challenge this theory.
Tyler’s novels deceive; seemingly about small domesticities and passage-of-life-events, they are really about the big, difficult questions we all face as we pass through different phases of life.
Excellent.

Read my reviews of these other books by Anne Tyler:-
A SPOOL OF BLUE THREAD
CLOCK DANCE
FRENCH BRAID
REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD
VINEGAR GIRL

And read the first paragraphs of:-
DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT 
BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWN UPS

If you like this, try:-
‘Olive Kitteridge’ by Elizabeth Strout
‘Mothering Sunday’ by Graham Swift
‘The Stars are Fire’ by Anita Shreve

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Bookreview LADDER OF YEARS by Anne Tyler https://wp.me/p5gEM4-49S via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Long View’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard #historical #marriage

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The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard is not so much a ‘what happens next’ novel as ‘what has happened in the past to lead to this situation’ story. It is a novel about choices and where they can lead. Howard tells the story, backwards from 1950 to 1926, of the marriage of Antonia and Conrad Fleming. As the story starts, the marriage seems doomed and you cannot help but wonder how these two people ever got married in the first place. In fact, once I finished it I was tempted to read it again from back to front. Elizabeth Jane HowardThe first paragraph is a masterful example of scene setting. It opens with a dinner party to celebrate the engagement of Julian Fleming to June, who has secretly spent the afternoon alone at the cinema. As Antonia considers the complicated marital affairs of her son – and her daughter, Deirdre, who is pregnant by a man who does not love her – I wondered how her own marriage must have shaped her children’s handling of relationships and how hers, in turn, was shaped by her parents. I found Conrad an almost totally unsympathetic character, indeed in the first part he is referred to simply as Mr Fleming. ‘One of his secret pleasures was the loading of social dice against himself. He did not seem for one moment to consider the efforts made by kind or sensitive people to even things up; or if such notions ever occurred to him, he would have observed them with detached amusement, and reloaded more dice.’
This is very much a novel of its time in which middle-class women had limited choices. As a young woman, Antonia lacks the strength to break out. She is timid, feeling she has proved unsatisfactory for both her mother and father. ‘She grew up, therefore, feeling, not precisely a failure so much as an unnecessary appendage.’ Her mother bemoans her lack of interests [Antonia does have interests, simply not those of her mother] and her father her lack of intellect [but without stimulus of career or education]. We see the transition from hopeful, eager young girl experiencing first love, to weary, middle age when the ‘trees ahead so horribly resembled the trees behind, and the undergrowth of their past caught and clung and tore at them as they moved on.’
This is Howard’s second novel. I am most familiar with her later ‘Cazalet Chronicles’ series and there are some key comparisons to be made in the writing style. Sentences in The Long View are longer, paragraphs longer, and the style not as simple and nuanced as the later books. Viewpoint also shifts within paragraphs, a technique she changed for the Cazalets. This is not to say this spoiled my enjoyment of The Long View, it is perhaps an observation for writers rather than readers, but it shows an interesting development in the author’s writing style. And I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of Antonia’s horse rides in Sussex, countryside in which the Cazalet’s house, Home Place, is set.

Read my reviews of ‘The Cazalet Chronicles’, also by Elizabeth Jane Howard:-
THE LIGHT YEARS #1CAZALET 
MARKING TIME #2CAZALET
CONFUSION  #3CAZALET
CASTING OFF #4CAZALET
ALL CHANGE #5CAZALET

If you like this, try:-
‘The Past’ by Tessa Hadley
‘Offshore’ by Penelope Fitzgerald
‘Mothering Sunday’ by Graham Swift

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE LONG VIEW by Elizabeth Jane Howard https://wp.me/p5gEM4-2ZS via @SandraDanby