Today is the onsale of Anne Tyler's 19th novel, The Beginner's Goodbye [Kindle]. For the first time in 35 years she's done a media blitz, including interviews with NPR, AP, Macleans, and USA Today. Two newspapers asked her friend and fellow Baltimorean John Waters to comment:
One: "We concentrate on the eccentrics," says the creator of Hairspray. "I always am interested in people who think they're normal and yet are totally insane. She writes about people who think of themselves as normal, and are normal, but also eccentrics who don't know it."
Two: Waters is also a huge admirer who says the fixation on Tyler's connection to Baltimore obscures her achievements as a fiction writer. "Anne could write about any city. She could never leave the house and write great fiction. She beautifully captures regular people who are not trying to be noticed. She writes about real life." As a filmmaker, he would love to see a foreign director adapt her books — "a European art film director, someone with a fresh eye."
Even more surprising than agreeing to the radio intrusion, Tyler two days ago was in a tweed jacket [above] on stage at the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, interviewed in front of a sold-out audience prior to receiving the 25th Sunday Times (UK) Award for Literary Excellence. Previous winners include Seamus Heaney, Muriel Spark, Margaret Atwood, Ted Hughes, Anthony Burgess, and John le Carre. The organizer said, "I can think of no modern English-language author who more deserves to be added to that list than Anne Tyler. The apparent effortlessness of her prose is matched by her empathy for her characters, the depth of her human understanding and the consistency of her literary vision." Last year she was shortlisted for the Booker International, losing to Philip Roth.
As it happens, a week ago Sunday was the 30th anniversary of the publication of what she considers her best book, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant [Kindle]. An irrefutable, timeless masterpiece of family life, the novel begins, "While Pearl Tull was dying, a funny thought occurred to her." (The book was a Pulitzer finalist, as was her next novel, The Accidental Tourist, and she won it for her next novel, Breathing Lessons.) Eudora Welty said, "If I could have written the last sentence of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, I'd have been happy the rest of my life."
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