SOURCE: Brookner, Anita. “A Disturbing Absence of Disturbance.” Spectator 294, no. 9152 (3 January 2004): 29-30.

In the following mixed review of The Amateur Marriage, Brookner compares the novels of Tyler and Carol Shields.

Anne Tyler has written 15 excellent novels—this is her 16th [The Amateur Marriage]—which proceed according to a formula she has made her own: romantic comedy of a prelapsarian kind, set in the suburbs of Baltimore in the blameless days of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, before greater disappointments set in to trouble the American consciousness.

This was the age of the best Hollywood films, in which a scatty, zesty heroine wore down the defences of the man on whom she had set her sights. In the best of these novels, The Accidental Tourist, the scatty zesty etc. heroine, a dog-trainer by occupation, wins the heart of the temporarily bereft man by appearing on the same flight that...