SOURCE: Carson, Barbara Harrell. “‘Endlessly Branching and Dividing’: Anne Tyler's Dynamic Causality.” Soundings 85, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 2002): 301-21.

In the following essay, Carson considers the topic of free will in Tyler's novels.

Anne Tyler's fifteen novels distinguish themselves from the usual run of novels of manners and social comedy with which they are sometimes associated, by asking life's really big questions:¹ What is the nature of time? What characterizes a good life? Where do we turn for meaning when our foundations collapse? Is reality external or internal? How do we locate—and live—our authentic identity? Perhaps the biggest question of all in Tyler's novels is the question of whether human behavior is fated or free. Her works dramatize the consequences of living with this mystery, showing how it feels to think you're “something dragged on a string behind a forgetful child” (as Charlotte Emory does in Earthly Possessions...