Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler
I recently returned to Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons, wanting to see what affected me so much the first time I read it (1988, a seeming lifetime ago). Breathing Lessons tells the story of a middle-aged Baltimore couple, Maggie and Ira Moran. It takes place in one day, the day of an out-of-town funeral that Maggie and Ira drive to and return from, which is also the day before their younger child, Daisy, leaves for college.
We stay mostly in Maggie’s point of view, harum-scarum, interfering Maggie, but occasionally dip into quiet, implacable Ira’s perspective. Maggie’s continual missteps and interferences – trying to rekindle their slacker son’s marriage, trying to punish a bad driver by yelling at him that his wheel’s about to fall off – along with her seeming mismatchedness with passive Ira, lead to many comic scenes. But underneath and between those comic scenes, Maggie and Ira muse on the passage of time, and on all the disappointments and discouragements they’ve suffered, and on marriage and family. Tyler has a wonderful way of balancing darkness – the understanding that life is short and sometimes not so beautiful – with humor, lightness, and nostalgia for this couple’s youth, in mid-1950s Baltimore. And she evokes such sympathy for Maggie and Ira; Maggie’s observations about midlife struck me when I first read this novel in my early twenties, and were even more striking the second time around, now that I’m getting close to Maggie’s age.
Tyler also handles time beautifully, moving seamlessly back and forth from the novel’s present time (mid-1980s) to the recent past, and to the past of thirty years ago (mid-1950s), going from scene to long flashback to scene. Her use of time reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, which has a similar structure to Breathing Lessons.
This time around, I also noticed what Tyler chose to leave out. The underlying pressure of the novel is that this couple is about to let go of their youngest child, Daisy. Maggie and Ira will drive Daisy to Princeton, a place that’s entirely out of their orbit of understanding, in the tomorrow of the novel. But that’s not the story; the impending trip stays mostly in the background, and Daisy herself shows up only in occasional flashback and for a moment at the end of the novel.
Here’s a link to The Independent’s (UK) review of Tyler’s latest novel, The Beginner’s Goodbye.