The Amateur Marriage

A Novel

By: Anne Tyler

Narrated by: Blair Brown

Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

They seemed like the perfect couple: young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother's grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.

Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable.

From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more fully into the complex entanglements of family life in this wise, embracing, and deeply perceptive novel.

©2004 Anne Tyler (P)2004 Random House, Inc., Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

"[Anne] Tyler's strength resides in her penetrating psychological portraits and delight in mundane details, and these gifts are evident....Her observations about how abruptly even the most boring life can go wrong, and about the fact that we are all amateurs in our first marriages, are poignant." (Booklist)
"Yes, Tyler intuitively understands the middle class' Norman Rockwell ideal, but she doesn't share it; rather, she has a masterful ability to make it bleed." (Publishers Weekly)

Incredibly Boring

Would you try another book from Anne Tyler and/or Blair Brown?

No.

Has The Amateur Marriage turned you off from other books in this genre?

No, just from this author.

Which character – as performed by Blair Brown – was your favorite?

Lindy...mostly because I didn't have to put up with her as long.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from The Amateur Marriage?

Most of them.

Any additional comments?

I found it interesting to read the other reviews. Hard to believe in many cases we were reading the same book! Maybe if you were already an Anne Tyler fan you cut her some slack. While I cant argue that it was likely a really accurate family portrayal, when I read I want to escape real life. On the plus side, their life was SOOOOO boring it made mine seem exciting by comparison!

Boring, depressing, waste of time

I've enjoyed reading previous Ann Tyler novels, but this one was like listening to my mother tell me boring stories about old distant relatives I didn't know or care about. It was well read but the story was predictable (wartime couple marry, raise kids, separate, divorce, man remarries, etc.) with each decade and its effects on the family members displayed generically (40s war effects on families; 50s black turtle necks and beatniks; 60s drugs, hippies; etc.) I finally stopped listening a couple hours from the end when I realized I could care less about any of the characters and was feeling punished by having to keep listening to avoid wasting my money.

Disappointing

Being an Anne Tyler fan I found this book to be less than expected. The characters are hard to warm up to and there seems to be no thread of happiness in this book. Used to the dry nature of Tylers novels I still found this one unsettling in a depressing sort of way.

a bad marriage and a bad book

How can one very gifted author write so badly in one book (Amateur Marriage) and so beautifully in others (most of her other books are magnificent)? What was she thinking when she wrote this dull interminable piece of fiction? It is a book of endless character development whose only plot is: a bad marriage gets worse.

Waste of time

This book did nothing for me. I couldn’t connect w/any of the characters. Pieces were left out that ours have enriched and deepened the book. Feels like it was mostly surface & little character development.

In the end, depressing.

Wouldn’t recommend it.

TOTAL WASTE OF TIME!!!!!

Sometimes I am just dumbfounded as to who claims to be a writer. The writer goes into great detail describing what she bought at the grocery store or what is included in a meatloaf...but says in passing that the main character died in an accident towards the end of the book...without any elaboration or warning. She constantly skips 10-15 years without mentioning how much time has passed. It's 10 minutes into the dialogue before you discover that the 9 year old she just talked about, is now 18 and in college. "Ten years later" would have been a helpful 3 words she could have used about 10 times in the book. The things she chose to talk about were so boring I would rather watch paint dry. BOO! BOO!

Depressing and Frustrating

Too many skipped years. Sad story without much of a redeeming value. You care for the characters, then all of a sudden 10 years go by. You care again and then a main character is suddenly written off. Frustrating. Too many skipped years and the overall story was just sad and depressing.

Not up to par

A big Anne Tyler fan, but this fell way short of my expectations. The characters seemed quite flat, and their obvious disinterest in one another did little to pull me in. It was as if every character was sedated in some way... oddly bothered less by the most life-altering events than by the mundane annoyances of their day-to-day lives. Perhaps this was her intention? Either way, I found very little in the way of character development-- a far cry from what I had expected given the quality of her earlier works.