Taibl is an English instructor and a writer. In this essay, Taibl discusses the difficulty of defining Tyler's work using traditional literary classifications.

Contemporary writers arrive on the literary scene with a force of history behind them. They arrive after major literary movements and eras and are sometimes compared to the romantics, the humanists, the southern school, or the Victorians. Sometimes a writer fits neatly into a category or the melding of a few categories. Anne Tyler, in a career that began in the 1960s and continues today, has been compared to all of these seemingly disparate schools and eras of literature. Not only can critics not agree on what category she belongs to, but they also cannot agree on how to read her work. Her prose has been called at once "brilliantly funny," by Robert McPhilips in his review of Breathing Lessons in The Nation, and...