SOURCE: "Attempting to Connect: Verbal Humor in the Novels of Anne Tyler," in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 60, No. 1, January, 1995, pp. 57-75.

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

In the essay "Still Just Writing," Anne Tyler comments on her unusual characters: "People have always seemed funny and strange to me"; in a letter to me dated November 24, 1991, she clarified what she means in describing people that way: "I think of 'funny and strange' as wonderful traits, which always make me feel hopeful when I spot them." Some reviewers have faulted Tyler, however, for exaggerating her characters to bizarre or eccentric proportions. Marita Golden, for example, reviewing Breathing Lessons, writes that Maggie Moran "has a Lucy Ricardo quality that undermines our empathy." However, other critics, Robert Towers, Joseph Mathewson, Wallace Stegner, and Alice Hall Petry specifically, have compared her...