Like most of her short stories, Anne Tyler's "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters" has been largely ignored by literary critics. Though very little has been written about the text, the story does encapsulate the Tyler reading experience as it focuses on themes of family, self-discovery, and the elevation of the ordinary to writers' material. Broad criticism of Tyler's work is therefore relevant to the story and certainly pertains to the growth of Tyler's writing career.

Criticism began to really shape Tyler's literary success in the late 1960s, when her work was reviewed and praised by critics John Updike and Gail Godwin. John Updike, in particular, provided a certain amount of fuel for Tyler's career in his review of Searching for Caleb, as printed in Anne Tyler as Novelist, in which he says that Tyler is "not merely good, she is wickedly good." Charlotte Templin in her...