Loss And Decline in the Novels of Anne Tyler: The “Slipping-Down” Life

In this careful assessment of Anne Tyler’s 16 novels, Adams (English emerita, Northern Kentucky U.) explores success and finds it has more than one American definition in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. She moves beyond recent critical assessments of Tyler’s work as sentimental, showing how those who find alternatives to the perpetual acquisition of more unhappiness in search of fulfillment do so at the cost of the loss of the sources of their unhappiness in the first place; in the process they find loss to be joyful as they shed lousy families, soul-destroying professions and ruinous cultural standards. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)