Anne Tyler's Earthly Possessions is written in the first person, the narrator a housewife of thirty-five who, having lived all her life in the same house in Clarion, Maryland, informs us in the first sentence of the book that she has decided to leave her husband. Just as she is about to get cash for the trip, she is kidnapped by a bank robber…. [The] character's own assessment of her situation [is that of an] outrageous joke. Miss Tyler does well a peculiarly feminine mode of self-belittling, sardonic humor, something like Carol Burnett's. (p. 611)
I'm not sure Miss Tyler is aware that the alternating chapters of [Earthly Possessions], though all in the first person, are really in two different voices: the retrospective and the eyewitness first person, one may call them. We accept the convention, in an eyewitness account of ongoing events, that the narrator will come to find out things unexpected at the beginning, as indeed Charlotte does in her experience with the bank robber. But in a retrospective account, a summing up of past events from the perspective of the present, we feel cheated unless we get some sense all along that the narrator knows how things will turn out. (p. 612)
Gilberto Perez, in The Hudson Review (copyright © 1977 by The Hudson Review, Inc.; reprinted by permission), Vol. XXX, No. 4, Winter, 1977–78.
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