required reading

Anne Tyler's latest novel, Digging to America, is ostensibly about the adoption of two Korean babies, Jin-Ho and Susan, by two American families, one Iranian-American and the other apple-pie American. The children themselves are a device which allows Tyler to bring these two families into contact with each other and from there to examine their developing friendship as they become almost an extended family. As in The Amateur Marriage, Anne Tyler is concerned how the passing of time affects relationships, revisiting the families at regular intervals year after year, through the point of view of a handful of major characters.

Tyler's themes are what it means to be American, what it means to be a foreigner, and what it means to be a stranger or a friend.

Bitsy and Brad are stereotypically American: loud, enthusiastic, warm, and overbearing. Meeting Sami and Ziba Yazdan at the airport, where they too are awaiting their adopted daughter, they instantly invite them to celebrate with them. The Yazdans initially refuse, but are soon drawn into Bitsy and Brad's yearly 'leaf-raking' parties and annual 'Arrival Day' anniversary celebrations. Bitsy and Brad want their daughter, Jin-Ho, to retain her cultural identity as a Korean, giving her soya milk to drink, and dressing her up in Korean costumes at parties. Ironically, they also give her the name Dickinson-Donaldson, and present her with a Stars and Stripes cake on Arrival Day each year.

The Yazdans have their own parties too, and the Dickinson-Donaldsons are often invited to Persian New Year celebrations.Tyler explores Sami and Ziba and grandmother Maryam's sense of not-quite-belonging, though she also records the attempts the Americans make to accommodate and assimilate the Iranian culture of their friends. 

Tyler's lesson seems to be that we all feel like strangers to each other sometimes. She meticulously records the detail of life, for example -  how one extra person in the room can turn someone from a best friend into an acquaintance. Her focus is set squarely on Bitsy (Jin-Ho's mother) and Maryam (Susan's grandmother), and their respective brash openness, and cold, dignified reserve. And if there is a moral at the end of the tale, it is that the former is the essence of life.

Tyler's attention to domesticity and detail has lead to her often being called the modern-day Jane Austen. Often it is well-observed, and this is especially the case in a moving depiction of the wearing quality of grief and bereavement part of the way through the novel:

He went to the kitchen and fixed himself a bowl of cold cereal, but he found it too hard to swallow and he gave up after three spoonfuls. He sat dully at the kitchen table and gazed out at the neighbors' backyard, wehre the tree men were cutting down a huge old gnarly maple. The day before they had lopped off the leafy tip ends and fed them to the chipper, and he could imagine that overnight the maple must have stood there in some botanical version of shock. But only the smallest branches had been removed, after all. A tree so large could adjust to that. This morning, though, the men had moved on to the larger branches, and perhaps that too acould have been adjusted to even though the tree had become as stubby and short-armed as a saguaro cactus. But now they were setting their chain saws to work on the trunk itself, and all those earlier adjustments turned out to have been for nothing.

He stood up heavily and carried his bowl to the sink.

Tyler manages to embrace symbolism without being heavy-handed, and without adjusting her narrative style or stretching the readers imagination (trees and food figure largely in the novel). However, I found her style tiring - a constant narrative gloss rested over everything. I hate needing to be told that a character is 'feeling unsettled and dissatisfied' (p.166), or that 'the thought stirred up a gently, almost pleasurable melancholy' (p.174). I'd much rather be able to deduce these things from the nuances of conversation and narrative without needing to be told. Whilst this gloss is an incontravertible part of Tyler's style it makes it hard for the reader to engage with the themes of foreignness and difference when every character in the novel feels the same, has the same texture.

All in all, I found Digging to America accomplished and smooth, with some neatly observed set pieces. Simple and satisfying, like a really good apple-pie, but a little lacking in excitement.