The Amateur Marriage

In 2019 I attempted to read this and couldn't make it through the first chapter. This time I found it engrossing and perceptive. Needless to say, much has happened in the years between 2017 and 2023...in the world and in my life...
Therefore, many of the events and themes resonate with me now... especially the regrets and disappointment one feels as one ages:

"It was thinking that made her nights so long. All the bad old thoughts came crowding to the front of her mind. She had lived her life wrong; she'd made a big mess of it."

"He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller."



It is definitely not a happy book, and would probably be better enjoyed by readers who have been married a long time and have ever show more wondered"What were the issues they'd quarreled about?" or had children tear their parent's hearts out with comments such as " 'just the five of us'; like that was something to be desired, and I'll never forget how claustrophobic that made me feel. Just the five of us in this wretched tangled knot, inward-turned, stunted, like a trapped fox chewing its own leg off."
So much for family togetherness!
But as Michael says of him and Pauline, "We did the best we could. We did our darnedest. We were just...unskilled; we never quite got the hand of things. It wasn't for lack of trying."

The family conflicts seem so familiar to a long-term marriage, and the ending is both poignant and heartbreaking. show less

Superficially, I could detest some of the self-centered behaviors exemplified by these characters but Tyler’s magic lies exactly in the simplistic way that she can portray complex family dynamics, personalities, betrayals and attachments within a family, etc., in a way that leaves you heartbroken but also ...like you can understand the common threads of their behavior. It was hard knowing who to side with, who to root for... Pauline was temperamental and difficult but her husband also played a part and the children paid a price. Yet, in hindsight, they did the best they could considering...mistakes that beget regret that beget resentment but then maybe weren’t complete mistakes after all...hard to say.

Did you get married to the human that your hormones were clamoring for? (Guilty. Resolved by divorce.) And then found out you made a mistake? At least my mistake has been a good provider. Something that should be taught starting in elementary school: a checklist to see if your friends live by mutual mores; how to choose a partner to create new humans with. Ok. On to this book.
I had so many laugh out loud moments. I don't know where the author got her material, but this was high comedy. But it was also sad. It was a portrayal of characters that is all-too realistic, and ends up creating deeply flawed, unhappy human beings because people make babies when they get married, regardless of whether they're compatible or not.
Pauline is an show more airhead riding the streetcar days after Pearl harbor, when she jumps off and cuts her head. Her girlfriends breathlessly bundle her into a nearby Polish grocery for a band-aid, and the owner's son cleans and bandages her cut. That was apparently enough reason for them to become boyfriend-girlfriend. The rah-rah atmosphere of neighborhood residents (and the whole country) causes the boy named Michael to enlist, and Pauline to gush over his patriotic fervor. He never makes it to the front; he is resentful and disgusted with the uncomfortable conditions and demanding physical training of bootcamp. Pauline sends him letters how she is going dancing with the local soldiers and he gets so furious that he tries to strangle his bunkmate who had an unrelenting cough, with a pillow. The cough-er returns the favor by (accidentally) shooting Michael in the ass. Michael is sent home walking with a cane. Now they marry and make three children. And the misery begins. show less

Anne Tyler is one of a hand-full of writers who can write about the same location and the same kind of characters and never feel cliched or irrelevant. All her characters are so whole and authentic that as I read I keep thinking, "I know this person" or "OMG, that is me".

That is Tyler, in general, now for this novel specifically. Pauline and Michael (the members of the aforesaid amateur marriage) are two very flawed opposites, entangled in a death-grip and unable to communicate on any meaningful level. They cannot be happy together, but they are afraid that they will not be able to be happy apart. At some point I decided that what binds them to one another is the convenience of having someone to blame for their own show more shortcomings.

Underneath some rank hostility, unbelievable indifference to the other's feelings, and insurmountable differences, there is a current of honest affection that persists to the last page of the book. They have had an amateur marriage because they enter into it without any idea of what they are really committing to and they never crack the secret code that might have made it a happy one. Still, I couldn't help asking myself, aren't all marriages amateur. Who knows what they will encounter, how they will deal with each other's quirks and needs, if they can juggle the responsibilities of aging parents and children and living in a house with intimates who sometimes feel like strangers. If you haven't experienced any of that, you can count yourself lucky indeed. show less

Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage is not so much a novel as a really long argument. Michael is a good boy from a Polish neighborhood in Baltimore; Pauline is a harum-scarum, bright-cheeked girl who blows into Michael's family's grocery store at the outset of World War II. She appears with a bloodied brow, supported by a gaggle of girlfriends. Michael patches her up, and neither of them are ever the same. Well, not the same as they were before, but pretty much the same as everyone else. After the war, they live over the shop with Michael's mother till they've saved enough to move to the suburbs. There they remain with their three children, until the onset of the sixties, when their eldest daughter runs away to San Francisco. Their show more marriage survives for a while, finally crumbling in the seventies. If this all sounds a tad generic, Tyler's case isn't helped by the characteristics she's given the two spouses. Him: repressed, censorious, quiet. Her: voluble, emotional, romantic. Mars, meet Venus. What marks this couple, though, and what makes them come alive, is their bitter, unproductive, tooth-and-nail fighting. Tyler is exploring the way that ordinary-seeming, prosperous people can survive in emotional poverty for years on end. She gets just right the tricks Michael and Pauline play on themselves in order to stay together: "How many times," Pauline asks herself, "when she was weary of dealing with Michael, had she forced herself to recall the way he'd looked that first day? The slant of his fine cheekbones, the firming of his lips as he pressed the adhesive tape in place on her forehead." Only in antogonism do Michael and Pauline find a way to express themselves. show less

This is a book I will definitely read again someday. When thinking about this review I wanted to box this story into a corner and call it a sad book, but I couldn't. It's such an accurate portrait of how a marriage (and ultimately, a life) can end up that I can't just call it "sad." How can I when it's beautiful, funny, tragic, infuriating, intelligent, frightening and honest all at the same time?
Michael and Pauline are two teenagers whose lives collide at the start of World War II. Their romance is the result of a marriage between a fear of the future and the desire to be someone else at that very instant. Michael wants a girlfriend, any girlfriend. Sensing Pauline's fascination with the war effort he spontaneously enlists. Pauline show more wants a soldier for a boyfriend. Any soldier. The culture and uncertainly of the times have thrown these two people together in such a way that neither of them can back out, despite the growing realization they were never meant to be together.
One things leads to another and soon thirty years have gone by. Pauline and Michael divorce and life goes on. And on. While the marriage didn't survive more than halfway through the novel, Michael and Pauline go on. Their relationship from beginning to end and beyond is captured beautifully. show less

If we are drawn to love stories at all, then we drawn to the stories of their disintegration; what happened? Is that why this story gripped me? Anne Tyler has such a gentle way with her characters that this emotional hold was surprising. "We just weren't very nice to one another," the male lead says. A critical insight - and his second marriage begins with a similar hurt.

My very favorite scene, though, had almost nothing to do with the story. It was of the day Pauline realized her marriage had ended and suddenly, there is her father. He comes in, sits down, and she is able to listen to him and speak some peace into his regrets, bestow some kind of forgiveness. Then he leaves. He is oblivious to her chaotic emotional state, which she show more hides. It was one of those truthful vignettes which seem emblematic of Ms. Tyler's stories. It's why I read her. show less