Ladder of Years

When Delia Grinstead walks out on her extended Baltimore family during a beach holiday in Delaware, her spontaneous decision not to return from her walk seems to be vindicated by the way the Missing Person notice reveals that her husband, sisters and children are not at all sure how tall she is, what colour her eyes are, or even what she was wearing when they last saw her.

Tyler has fun exploring the idea of fugue, something we’ve probably all had fantasies about at some point in our lives, and imagining how a woman who has always been taken for granted by those around her might emerge as a distinct personality when she is placed in a new setting. As usual, the characters and their surroundings are flawlessly drawn, the dialogue is show more wonderfully convincing, but the plot makes us wonder how Tyler ever imagined she would get Delia out of the corner she had painted her into. show less

Delia has been married to Sam, a doctor she met when he arrived a junior partner in her father's medical practice, for years and they have three nearly grown children together. Delia feels under-appreciated and somewhat bored with her life. One summer while the family is at the shore for their annual vacation Delia goes for a walk and just keeps on going. She ends up in a small town several hours away from her Baltimore home and finds a life for herself there...or does she?

With her usual genius for bringing very ordinary people into sharp focus, Tyler tells the story of Delia Grinstead, a 40-year old mother of three who literally walks away from her life without plan or purpose in the middle of a family beach vacation. Not surprisingly, she finds that starting over "from scratch" isn't as simple as she tries to make it. The story feels absolutely "true"-- I believe every sentence, every action, and never have that "Oh why don't you just (insert advice here) already!" feeling. And Tyler makes me chuckle over the simple little daily moments that I laugh at in my own life. I think sometimes it's easy to overlook her humor---she's so often gently poking fun at her characters, but with love. I was not at all show more surprised by the ending, but it did come on a bit abruptly. Otherwise, nary a quibble with this one. Oh, wait, yes, one more---was it absolutely necessary to include an unlikeable character named Linda???? show less

This is a book I reread often. The premise is simple: Delia Grinstead, a vaguely unhappy forty-year-old homemaker, runs away from home without any conscious intention of doing so. The tone is humorous, even upbeat, but it's impossible to lose sight of the fact that she abandons her family. Every step of her journey is an accident, a stumble; but she allows each step to carry her away. Is she forgivable? After at least a dozen readings, I still can't answer that.

I do know that the writing here is brilliant. Little phrases catch at me. A cardigan "clung gently to her arms and made her feel like a cherished child." Delia scoops up a cat "beneath his hot little downy armpits." Rock music is performed by "singers who might as well be show more gossiping amongst themselves except every now and then you manage to overhear a stray word or two."

And this passage, maybe my favorite from the whole book: "She was learning the value of boredom. She was clearing out her mind. She had always known that her body was just a shell she lived in, but it occurred to her now that her mind was yet another shell -- in which case, who was 'she'? She was clearing out her mind to see what was left. Maybe there would be nothing."

I have very mixed feelings about Delia's final choice at the end of the book. I even have mixed feelings about the fact that I have mixed feelings, because how could the story end any other way? Only one thing is clear: people who haven't read this book yet, should. show less

I never know how an Anne Tyler novel is going to end. She has a way of trailing infinite possibilities behind her advancing prose. This is part of what keeps me reading her books. Usually I'm content enough when I arrive at her final destination. However, the ending to this one infuriated me, causing acute pain and a sense of betrayal. The pain and betrayal came from having liked the book a lot up until then, and from my sympathy toward the main character. Sometimes as a reader one sees things quite differently from how the writer sees those same things. Unfortunately, sometimes this difference isn't fully revealed until the very end of a book. But I don't want to think about it for the length of time required to write any more details, show more nor do I want to hide the review because of spoilers.

In the case of this rating, ending trumps all: 2 stars for the ending, 4 stars for the rest of the book. show less

I'm surprised by how much I enjoyed this story and these characters. At first I was annoyed with Delia for being so self-centered, for not attempting to truly understand her loved ones, for thinking that all they said and did was a reflection of their interactions with her. But gradually & subtly she, and we, learn more about their inner lives.

By the time the book ended, I *still* wasn't sure just how it was going to... even though I read carefully, fully absorbed, savoringly. And even when I learned the ending, I had to think about it. I'm still not sure it was the ending *I* wanted, but it's the best for these characters.*

And Tyler makes it all look effortless. The theme of second chances in love is expressed in so many different show more characters' lives, in so many different shapes & styles, it feels like we're reading several stories at once. In that way, it somewhat resembles a Maeve Binchy book - but it's even better.

Tyler is such a good writer. All the details she drops in with such studied casualness make it easy to feel as if one knows the characters as real people. A ginger jar in the B.B Dr's waiting room, the twins' dresses the color of Crest fluoride toothpaste, buying barley for gripe water (I never heard of it before, but from those two sentences I know I want to make it).

Walking with a two year-old, at his pace, Delia felt she had never seen Bay Borough in such detail -- every plastic cup lid wheeling along the sidewalk, every sparrow pecking tinfoil in the gutter." This detail was perfect for me, because I notice litter & such one of the first times I walk through a new place. And so that's one way Delia and I differ - she's more focused on what's in front, what's significant, and I (as Tyler has made apparent) need to spend less time looking down and focusing on the negativity.

I love that Delia, at age 40, discovered the library, and started borrowing books, instead of buying trashy romances. After a bit, well before she started reading classics, she isn't satisfied by the books she used to read. And when she is caught away and needs to buy a book, (because she finds TV exhausting, as do I) she buys "something serious and believable, about poor people in Maine." (Probably [b:The Beans of Egypt, Maine|263862|The Beans of Egypt, Maine|Carolyn Chute|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1389141854s/263862.jpg|464869]**)

Btw, I'll save you some research (if you want, but I'll hide it in spoilers if you don't. Very early on we learn that Delia's name is Cordelia, and when a character asks if she's "her father's Cordelia" he is referring to the youngest daughter of King Lear. And the song Delia's father sang to her as a lullaby is something I'd consider entirely inappropriate, by Johnny Cash:
Delia's Gone

Delia, oh, Delia Delia all my life
If I hadn't have shot poor
Delia I'd have had her for my wife
Delia's gone, one more round Delia's gone

I went up to Memphis
And I met Delia there Found her in her parlor
And I tied to her chair
Delia's gone, one more round Delia's gone

She was low down and trifling
And she was cold and mean
Kind of evil make me want to Grab my sub machine
Delia's gone, one more round Delia's gone

First time I shot her I shot her in the side
Hard to watch her suffer
But with the second shot she died
Delia's gone, one more round Delia's gone

But jailer, oh, jailer Jailer,
I can't sleep 'Cause all around my bedside
I hear the patter of Delia's feet
Delia's gone, one more round Delia's gone
So if you woman's devilish
You can let her run
Or you… Full lyrics on Google Play

And probably one of my favorite passages (even though, if over-analyzed, it can certainly be rendered meaningless):
"Oh, the otherness of Delia's children never failed to entrance her! She considered it a sort of bonus gift -- a means of experiencing, up close, an entirely opposite way of being."

*Some readers' reviews question the ending. Do *not* read the spoiler if you have *any* intention of reading this book. Even after you've read it, think about the ending, come to your own conclusion, before reading what I figured out:
The idea is that she owes her first allegiance to her own family - and that she's come to realize they do need, and deserve, her. And that she does love them. Noah and Joel will be ok. Maybe even Ellie will come back - she was advised to by Delia, remember, when she confessed to D. that she wonders if she'd made a mistake, and that she missed them.

I imagine, based on clues in the text, that she'll visit Bay B. sometimes. And folks back there may visit her... after all, Nat did in his hour of need. She'll not just run away like she did the year before.

I think I was able to read carefully because I empathized. I am actually, embarrassingly, on my third marriage. I'm a slow learner - so I wanted to pay attention to this story and learn how Delia made her choice.

** Well, researching that cleared up a confusion that's been lurking in the back of my mind. [b:The Beans of Egypt, Maine|263862|The Beans of Egypt, Maine|Carolyn Chute|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1389141854s/263862.jpg|464869] is *not* [b:The Bean Trees|30868|The Bean Trees (Greer Family, #1)|Barbara Kingsolver|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1362981087s/30868.jpg|1095121], though they do both have something to do with rural poverty. Yay for me figuring that out." show less

Cordelia Grinstead is a wife and mother to three children. Her husband Sam, a doctor, recently suffered a heart attack, (though Delia, as she is commonly known, refers to it as chest pains). At or about the same time her father died after Delia had cared for him for some time in her own home.
Her children are all teenagers and have become more independent and less reliant on their mother. Delia’s husband has become distant and less attentive. Delia has becoming unsure of her role as a mother, a wife and in the world in general.
While on the annual family holiday with her family and her sisters, Eliza and Linda and the latter’s children, Delia asks a young man who was working on the holiday home to drive her to a place she knows show more nothing of. She asks the young man to stop at a small town and there she begins a new life with only the possessions she is wearing and what is within her tote bag.
On the surface, The Ladder of Years appears to be a run of the mill novel about a middle aged woman going through the proverbial mid-life crisis. This appearance seems justified when you throw stroppy, mumbling, uncommunicative teenagers and an inattentive older husband in to the mix.
However, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Anne Tyler has written a novel that defies cliché, stereotype and one’s preconceived ideas of what a woman’s mid-life crisis looks like. A clever choice on Anne Tyler’s part was to write the book in the third person. It would have been easier to have written the novel in the first person and allow us the reader to get a better and easier understanding of Delia’s motives and thoughts on her behaviour. But writing the novel in the third person puts the reader at a slight distance from Delia so making it harder to empathize or sympathize with her. It makes the reader have to work that bit harder in getting to understand Delia and her reasoning and in this process makes the reading of the novel that much more satisfying.
I also believe that writing in the third person allows many male readers to follow Delia’s character without feelings of being uncomfortable in their male skin than had the novel been written in the first person. It is possible that many male readers would have found it uncomfortable or off putting to follow the character had they had access to her inner thoughts and feelings. By writing in the third person male readers are allowed to keep their distance and not made to feel that they inhabit a female persona.
All the characters within The Ladder of Years are rounded three dimensional people and as a reader I felt that I knew and understood each of the novel’s inhabitants by the end of the book. This knowing and understanding is from the perspective of a friend of the family and not as a family member. By this I mean that as much as I believed I knew the character’s motives and reasons for what they did and how they lived I still couldn’t be sure I was getting the full picture. This I believe was intentional on the author’s part. I believe that Anne Tyler was trying to communicate that we never fully know someone else even when they are family. There are times in our lives when we feel like we are an outsider within our own family group looking in through a window that becomes more opaque as time moves on.
Anne Tyler’s novel is a well crafted moving and at times funny novel that will not disappoint any reader, even the male of the species.

Number of pages – 326
Sex scenes – none
Profanity – none
Genre – drama/fiction show less