"Sidelights"
Despite her status as a best-selling novelist, Anne Tyler remains a private person who rarely lets public demands interfere with her family life. She shuns most interviews, avoids talk-show appearances, and prefers her home in Baltimore, Maryland, to New York City. As the author explained in an e-mail correspondence with Alden Mudge for BookPage online: "I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward." In a body of work that spans over four decades, Tyler has earned what former Detroit News reporter Bruce Cook called "a solid literary reputation ... that is based solely on the quality of her books."
Tyler's work has always been critically well received, but reviews of her early novels were generally relegated to the back pages of book review sections. Not until the publication of Celestial Navigation, which captured the attention of novelist Gail Godwin, and Searching for Caleb, which John Updike recommended to his readers, did she gain widespread acclaim. "Now," said Cook, "her books are reviewed in the front of the literary journals and that means she is somebody to reckon with. No longer one of America's best unknown writers, she is now recognized as one of America's best writers. Period."
Born in Minnesota, Tyler lived in various Quaker communes throughout the Midwest and North Carolina. She attended high school in Raleigh and at age sixteen entered Duke University where she fell under the influence of Reynolds Price, then a promising young novelist who had attended her high school. It was Price who encouraged the young Russian major to pursue her writing, and she did--but it remained a secondary pursuit until 1967, the year she and her husband settled in Baltimore. The longer she stayed in Baltimore, the more prominently Baltimore figured in her books, lending them an ambience both citified and southern, and leading Price to proclaim her "the nearest thing we have to an urban Southern novelist." Writing in the New Yorker, Updike compared her to Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty: "Anne Tyler, in her gifts both of dreaming and of realizing, evokes comparison with these writers, and in her tone and subject matter seems deliberately to seek association with the Southern ambiance that, in less cosmopolitan times, they naturally and inevitably breathed. Even their aura of regional isolation is imitated by Miss Tyler as she holds fast, in her imagination and in her person, to a Baltimore with only Southern exits; her characters when they flee, never flee north."
Other reviewers, such as Katha Pollitt, have found Tyler's novels more difficult to classify. "They are Southern in their sure sense of family and place," Pollitt wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "but [they] lack the taste for violence and the Gothic that often characterizes self-consciously Southern literature. They are modern in their fictional techniques, yet utterly unconcerned with the contemporary moment as a subject, so that, with only...