Breathing Lessons Essay | Critical Essay #4

Breathing Lessons Critical Essay #4

In the following excerpt, Towers focuses on the unconventional qualities in Breathing Lessons.

[In] Anne Tyler's novels, sympathetic recognition of her characters comes almost too easily, even as their expected oddity holds out the promise of small surprises. Like the Rabbit novels of John Updike, her books expertly render a familiar world in which our own observations are played back to us, slightly magnified, and with an enhanced clarity. Anne Tyler seems to know all there is to know about the surfaces of contemporary middle-middle-to lower-middle-class life in America, and if she chooses not to explore the abysses, she is nonetheless able to dramatize—often memorably—the ordinary crises of domestic life, of marriage and separation, of young love, parenthood, and even death. Though her style lacks Updike's metaphoric glitter, it has a strength and suppleness of its own. She can also be very funny.

In her recent novels—Dinner at...
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