In the followingessay, Gilbert presents an overview of Tyler's work and major themes.

In the following essay, Robertson analyzes how Tyler changes traditional ideas about family and its interaction with outsiders in her novels.

In the following essay, Coleman considers the role of redemption in The Clock Winder and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

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

In the following essay, Nollen examines three father figures in Tyler's fiction: Jeremy Pauling in Celestial Navigation, Ian Bedloe in Saint Maybe, and Macon Leary in The Accidental Tourist.

In the following essay, Grove discusses Tyler as a Southern writer and elucidates the role of place in Morgan's Passing.

In the following essay, Macpherson explores Tyler's use of fantasy and metafiction in Ladder of Years and discusses the role of the mother in the novel.

In the following essay, Willrich presents an overview of Tyler's life, career, and approach to writing.

In the following essay, Jones perceives Ladder of Years as a “postfeminist revision” of Kate Chopin's The Awakening.

In the following essay, Bennett outlines the various types of verbal humor Tyler employs in her novels.

In the following essay, Durham explores the shifting gender roles in Saint Maybe.

In the following essay. Bowers discusses the inside knowledge that Tyler shares with the readers of her novels.

In the following essay, Dasgupta asserts that Tyler's fiction “may be regarded as a felicitous fusion of social and individual consciousness with emphasis on the latter, a common characteristic of postmodern literary art.”

In the following essay, Petry discusses how Tyler uses black characters as repositories of wisdom and knowledge in her novels.

In the following review, Simon praises Tyler's characterization of Barnaby, the protagonist of The Patchwork Planet.

In the following review, Parini states that Tyler's Saint Maybe is "a realistic chronicle that celebrates family life without erasing the pain and boredom that families almost necessarily inflict upon their members."

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

Anne Tyler, [like John Cheever], has sought brightness in the ordinary, and her art has needed only the darkening that would give her beautifully sketched shapes solidity. So evenly has her imagination moved across the details of the mundane that the novels, each admirable, sink in the mind without leaving an impression of essential, compulsive subject matter—the phobia portrayed in Celestial Navigation being something of an exception. Now, in [Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant], she has arrived, I t...

Good writers often have preoccupations. Sets of characters or pieces of experience repeat themselves in book after book because an idea of life is being obsessed over. If a reader is responsive to the preoccupation, each new book deepens the tale being told. If a reader is not responsive, the writer is silently instructed: "Tell another story, you've told this one already." Anne Tyler is a writer with a preoccupation. Writing in a time and place that is stimulated by the idea of the sep...

In the following mixed review, Brookner argues that although Back When We Were Grownups “is as accomplished as ever there are signs that the formula may be showing its age.”

In the following review, Rose offers a favorable assessment of Back When We Were Grownups.

In the following excerpt, Sutherland discusses the humility of Ian, the main character of Tyler's Saint Maybe, and calls him "the accidental hero" of the novel.

[The only question remaining about Anne Tyler's] talent is: Will it ever, in its scintillating display of plenitude, make a dent as deep in our national self-awareness and literature as that left by the work of O'Connor, and Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty? For Anne Tyler, in her gifts both of dreaming and of realizing, evokes comparison with these writers, and in her tone and subject matter seems deliberately to seek association with the Southern ambience that, in less cosmopolitan times, ...

In the following review, Stovel deems The Patchwork Planet “an amusing and enlightening odyssey.”

I was born right here in Clarion; I grew up in that big brown turreted house next to Percy's Texaco. My mother was a fat lady who used to teach first grade. Her maiden name was Lacey Dabney. This paragraph opens the second chapter of Anne Tyler's Earthly Possessions, and it is very arch. What do I know about "that" house, or Clarion, or Percy, that I should be thus invited in; if I accept the invitation, what can I make of someone who calls her mother &...

Every other year or so since 1964, loyal readers pick up their new Anne Tyler novel as they would buy a favored brand of sensible shoe. Each of her nine books is solidly constructed from authentic and durable materials. Yet traditional style and comfort do not necessarily mean dullness. Tyler's characters have character: quirks, odd angles of vision, colorful mean streaks and harmonic longings. They usually live in ordinary settings, like Baltimore, the author's current home, and do not seem t...

The fact that 24-year-old Anne Tyler … grew up in Raleigh, N.C., must seem to her significant enough to make her publishers note on the jacket of ["The Tin Can Tree"] that she "considers herself a Southerner." And this novel, in so far as it goes in for regional subject matter, does report upon life in still another rural Southern pocket. Her characters are the eight inhabitants of a three-family house on the edge of backwater tobacco fields—two bachelor brothers, t...

In the following review, Jacobs claims that although Back When We Were Grownups is a good read, it is not one of Tyler's best novels.

Writers are rare who can swiftly generate a story with instantly distinguishable characters and the prospect of development. Rarer still is the fiction artist who controls his material with such subtle dexterity that his presence is barely felt. To do so is essentially the dramatist's craft, normally mastered in middle age, when the artist is exhausted of illusions that any part of the world spins at the lashing of his single will and when he is ripe in his understanding of the inherent mechanism of ...

Like a sentry or a detective, Anne Tyler seems to notice everything: the pale fluorescent gloom of laundromats, pockets filled with lint-covered jellybeans, the smell of crabcakes and coconut oil on a Delaware beach, grapy veins in the calves of middle-aged mothers. As a chronicler of domestic fuss, Tyler can be compared to John Updike…. In Tyler's work, however, everything is scuffed-up and comfortably lived-in; "Wash Me" is written into the dust. Her characters are fraying at t...

In the following review of The Amateur Marriage, the critic maintains that “the range and power of this novel should not only please Tyler's immense readership but also awaken us to the collective excellence of her career.”

Several Southern novels have come out in the past year or so which bear little resemblance to earlier literary legends of the South. These novels are not about the Tobacco Roads of 40 years ago. Nor do they dwell consciously on the dynamics of Negro-white relationships. Instead they reflect a South not so very different from small-town society anywhere in the United States. As the old agrarian South has become part of the past, life since World War II has grown to be more and more middle-class.

On one level, [Morgan's Passing is about a] disturbed man, a man "who had gone to pieces," or who had "arrived unassembled." Gower Morgan, the novel's protagonist, is … someone who, for lack of an identity of his own, impersonates a ragtag assortment of selves. The actual circumstances of his life are ordinary with a vengeance…. The interplay of a drab, mediocre reality and of second-rate fantasies is an intriguing theme. It suggests what happens to th...

"Morgan's Passing" is a narrative replete with colorful and idiosyncratic detail, precise in its tenderness. And yet, for all its intentness of specification, the book—like its subject, Morgan Gower—eludes and continues to elude one. The reader stalks Morgan as Morgan stalks Emily and, always, Morgan is just barely out of reach, turning the corner or dipping into some doorway or flattening against a wall, as fugitive and remittent as the refrain from a song one can'...

In the paradoxical character of Emily, at once passive and inflexible, ruthless in her rejections and unswerving in her loyalty, Tyler has created [in Morgan's Passing] the kissing cousin to Charlotte Emory, the heroine of her last novel, Earthly Possessions. Both women achieve spiritual freedom in circumstances of poverty and psychological subjection; both are dutiful victims, not of the sexist gargoyles grimacing from the pages of so many recent novels, but of entirely ordinary men of limited compe...

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-belit...

The family as a sealed unit, with an imperious grip on its members through the twin traps of heredity and environment, is the subject of [Searching for Caleb]…. The Pecks, a well-to-do Baltimore clan, are skillfully traced from the founding father down four generations to the single young descendant. The shape of the family tree, as one character notes, is a diamond. Outsiders brought in by marriage do not thrive: the insular Peck personality, a mélange of mediocrity, loyalty, emotional evasio...

"Earthly Possessions" … is just another one of those slightly stale, wry books that so many women writers seem to be turning out: A heroine who is a rueful optimist or cheerful pessimist, takes us on a long walk through the world in order to point out its incongruities. A Michelin guide to desolate panoramas, dismal accommodations, poor fare. A woman laughing out of the other side of her mouth…. Charlotte is the nearest thing to a character in "Earthly Possessions,"...

Anne Tyler goes at her work with as much gusto as Margaret Drabble, but on a smaller scale and in a style that is more tightly controlled. Miss Tyler has learned a great deal about her craft … since her first novel was published, but she has retained a kind of innocence in her view of life, a sense of wonder at all the crazy things in the world and an abiding affection for her own flaky characters. (p. 120) Miss Tyler is concerned with the quality of human existence. She turns her characters loose to...

Before she is done, Anne Tyler will have populated an entire imaginary state of Maryland with odd people about whom you are obliged to care because their oddities are what we see at an angle in the mirror in the middle of a bad night—what we might have been, what we want to be, what we should have refrained from becoming. She is a witch. (p. 206) Miss Tyler, witty, civilized, curious, with her radar ears and her quill pen dipped on one page in acid and on the next in orange liqueur, is asking whether...