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)

Awesome Anne Tyler

Okay so I'm a little biased. Grew up in Baltimore, got married in Baltimore, had an amateur marriage exactly like the one in the book but geez this woman gets it right every time. Once again she leaves me with the feeling that no family is perfect, that everything is okay, it always was and always will be. Just not in the way I might think.

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.

Vintage Anne Tyler But Different

The Amateur Marriage is a nearly vintage Anne Tyler novel:, offering a slightly off-kilter family, a fine sense of time and place and an excellent eye for detail expressed in well-turned phrases. But this book is written on a larger canvas than her others, spanning over 40 years in the lives of Pauline and Michael Anton. The story begins in 1941 at the start of World War II when Pauline falls in love with Michael for no other reason than she needed a man to send off to war. But Michael?s war career is short-lived and he soon comes limping back to Baltimore and into Pauline?s waiting arms. They quickly marry and live with Michael?s mother over the family grocery story. It is immediately clear that the couple is not a perfect fit. Pauline is impulsive, determined and ambitious while Michael is slow, plodding and perfectly happy in his small inner-city grocery store. Pauline?s will prevails, however, and the couple?along with Mother Anton and their new daughter, Lindy?move to one of the spanking new suburbs that blossomed around the country in the early 50s. Michael opens a new grocery story and the family adds to two more children. Except for the constant bickering between Pauline and Michael, all is well until Lindy abruptly vanishes, the only trace of her the three-year old son she abandons in San Francisco. Still devastated over the loss of their daughter, the Antons bravely press on and begin another round of carpools to raise their missing daughter?s son. Unlike most Tyler novels, this one contains no epiphanies, no sudden moments of understanding. Instead, there is a rather helpless sense of time rushing on while the characters spin out their lives caught up in trivialities. And while Tyler might be criticized for giving her characters little or no motivations for their life?s choices, she can be praised for creating a family we like and care about. And that is what makes this novel worth reading.

romance? please re-catogorize!

reading this was an unpleasant experience - making you care for the characters in the wonderful opening chapters just enough so that you could feel enormous disappointment when you were left in limbo as to their fate when decades would vanish from their lives. It was really painful. more than a waste of time - this read was downright aggravating! and Audible should not call it romance, more like Greek tragedy.

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!

Beautiful story

This is a treasure of a book. The characters are real and developed with care. The story is real and unvarnished. Unlike a lot of Anne Tyler’s characters, these are not dysfunctional and silly. They are ordinary people making their way along through life as best as they know how. Things seldom work out like a fairy tale.

One of my favorite Anne Tyler books

Seems like this one is a "really like it" or "really don't like it" with listeners/readers. For me, it was one of my favorites.

Great plot, great characters, great Audible narrator. Tyler juggles characters and time very well. Even though years and years pass, you don't feel shortchanged. The story and characters still feel fully realized.

I think Spool of Blue Thread is my all-time favorite Tyler novel, however.

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.

Engaging and thought provoking

I thoroughly enjoyed this, as I do all of Tyler's books. She has a way of capturing exactly what you are feeling, and of embracing life with all its imperfections. I am surprised that others found the story uninteresting. I was completely caught up in it, to the point that I turned it on in my car even if I was going a short distance. It is true that one of the main characters is almost unbearably depressing toward the end, but I like books that do not shy away from difficult subjects, and I thought the ending nicely redeemed this thread. Not for those who want a happy story, but great for those who want writing that beautifully articulates the human condition.

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.