If you ever wanted to get inside a marriage of two mismatched personalities, this is an excellent novel for that experience, in so far as one can ever get ‘inside’ someone else’ marriage. Tyler does an excellent job of somehow peeling back the usually hidden, and most private and intimate emotional complexities of the marriage relationship.
In 1941 in St Cassian, a Baltimore neighbourhood, war and enlisting is in the air. Michael Anton who is just 20 at the time, helps his widowed mother in the grocery shop they own, and is caught up in the fevered expectation and festivity of the moment, particularly the fevered expectation of Pauline, a girl he had not seen before that morning of the parade for enlisted men. St Cassian is a small town, not particularly prosperous, and full of Polish immigrants (the surnames of the customers and neighbours are the key indicator – Bryk, Vilna, Pozniak, Brunek, Anton(cyzk), Kostka, Pelowski, Moscowicz, etc). Pauline is seen almost as a foreigner, although she lives just 20 minutes walking away, but from a different walk of life, neighbourhood and church (Protestant). She appears to come from an entirely different culture too, a more affluent and cosmopolitan one.
Their differences are problematic from the beginning, but both seem helpless and hapless in the headlong rush to pair off and marry in that period, and at their stage of life. When Michael is injured in training and sent home for good, Pauline feels she cannot leave a man in that condition, and marries him against her own knowledge that they are incompatible. Michael starts out head over heels in love with the girl he first saw in a bright red coat, but rapidly falls out of love with her as she carps at him for all their differences, which she perceives as not good enough for her standards. No doormat, Michael does not capitulate to her wishes every time, stands his ground, and the result is conflict and quarrels. They quarrelled about everything, from money to their sex life, and quarrelled incessantly.
“But the worst quarrels […] were the ones where he couldn’t pinpoint the cause. The ones that simply materialized, developing less from something they said than from who they were, by nature. By nature, Pauline tumbled through life helter-skelter while Michael proceeded deliberately. By nature, Pauline felt entitled to spill anything that came into her head while Michael measured out every word. She was brimming with energy – a floor pacer, a foot jiggler, a finger drummer – while he was slow and plodding and secretly somewhat lazy. Everything to her was all or mothering […] while to him the world was calibrated more incrementally and fuzzily
p45-46
The novel is beautifully balanced, however, with periods where they do appreciate each other, lean on each other, cooperate as a couple, and build a life together, somehow. Tyler’s characteristic manner of moving her novels forward in time in leaps and bounds works particularly well in this book. Swiftly, Pauline and Michael are married, and Pauline moves into the apartment above the store, sharing a home with Michael’s mother, and getting on well with her. She has Lindy and then George in quick succession. Soon we see that there is a third child, Karen, and the Antons have moved (thanks to Pauline’s father’s financial assistance) to a new house, Elmview Acres in Baltimore County, and Michael has set up a new and far more prosperous, modern grocery store. Then we hear Michael’s mother has passed away, and Pauline’s parents in time too, and we are plunged into the family’s problem with deviant 16-year-old Lindy, who runs away from home and is not seen again by her distraught family for decades. However, in Lindy’s 20s, her parents get a call to go to San Francisco to pick up Pagan, her son, who has been left in the care of Lindy’s landlady – and the family augments again. George grows up and marries Sally, Karen moves away, and then on the night of their thirtieth wedding anniversary dinner, Michael and Pauline have another quarrel, but unusually, this results in Michael walking out. His leaving is unthinkable to Pauline at first, but he does leave, and eventually they divorce. Michael remarries an old school friend of Pauline’s – Anna Grant – who is in character, much more like Michael himself. Pauline accepts dates with many men, but does not remarry. After Pauline has passed away, Lindy is reunited with her family. The plotline moves at dizzying speed at times, and then at other times, it homes in on the day-to-day minutia and even minute-to-minute detail in exquisite close-up. It is the mark of a very confident, skilled novelist, to be able to make these sharp changes from incremental movement to leaps of decades in time, without losing the reader or fragmenting the storyline.
The beauty of the novel’s analysis is the juxtaposition of events with the careful unpacking of Michael and Pauline’s inner reflections on what has gone wrong in the marriage. Michael muses:
“Sometimes he felt they were more like brother and sister than husband and wife. This constant elbowing and competing, jockeying for position, glorying in I-told-you-so. Did other couples behave that way? They didn’t seem to, at least from outside.
He believed that all of them, all those young marrieds of the war years, had started out in equal ignorance. He pictured them marching down a city street, as people had on the day he enlisted. Then two by two they fell away, having grown wise and seasoned and comfortable in their roles, until only he and Pauline remained, as inexperienced as ever, the last couple in the amateur’s parade,
p168
From Pauline’s part, the novel beautifully unpacks her frustrations at the constrictions of being married to Michael, while showing how a woman of her age and time builds her very self-identify on the role of a wife, and cannot conceive of any way out of that role:
“She chafed daily at his failings: his rigidity, his caution, his literal-mindedness, his ponderous style of speech, his reluctance to spend money, his suspicion of anything unfamiliar, his tendency to pass judgement, his limited understanding of his own children, his uncharitable attitude toward people down on their luck, his dislike of all social occasions, his stodginess in bed, his magical ability to make her seem hysterical, his infuriatingly patient “Now Poll,” whenever she was upset, his fondness for reminding her during quarrels of weaknesses she had too gullibly confessed at happier moments. And yet underneath, she knew that none of these was the real problem. The real problem was that they were mismatched. They simply never should have married each other.
Although whenever he voiced this thought himself, it cut her to the heart. He would be willing to give her up? He could picture a life without her? Then she would see perhaps it was not that he was too slow but that she was too quick and impatient, not that he was too deliberate but that she was too reckless, and so forth. And she would dissolve into tears and wish she could do it all all over again – meet him, fall in love, marry him – but this time, properly valuing him.
p75
In the end, as the novel shows, it is not so much a mismatch of personalities that doom the marriage; nor is it even the failure to negotiate and compromise; rather it is the inability of the pair in the marriage to bring out the best in each other, and instead, each seems to bring out the worst in the other. In that sense, it was a relationship which could never have been happy, not withstanding mutual attraction, appreciation, mutual dependence, mutual concerns. Tyler writes a truly absorbing novel about a dysfunctional marriage which nevertheless lasts 30 years and a relationship which goes beyond that, and even beyond the death of one of its partners.
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