The Amateur Marriage

A Novel

By: Anne Tyler

Narrated by: Blair Brown

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)

The Summer Book!

Beach and pool. Another great AT ! Tears at the finish. What more do you want?!

A Moving Story

Human, warm and real, characters fully developed. Funny, even hilarious moments, and a gathering sadness. Anne Tyler is a master at conversation. Skilled narration. At the end of our trip we had a half hour remaining so we sat in the garage and heard it out.

William Harrop
Bethesda, MD

Amateur Marriage

I like Anne Tyler and she managed to keep a rather mundane story interesting. I do not think it was one of her best. I felt a little disconnected at the end, and I didn't much like the way she made her main character dissapear. There was something disturbing about the story, as I'm sure the author intended. It was not a warm fuzzy that left you satisfied. It wasn't very uplifting.

Entertaining But Lacking

This book is more a reflection of how easy it is to give up on a marriage today than anything else. Just walk away. The wife is someone I would want to walk away from, but that is not the point. The husband is no winner and the kids must manage the parents lives at some points.

Aside from the skipping around, giving no explanations or depths for significant events (the daughter running away, the wife dying), this book totally frustrated me!!

The narration was excellent. I just wish the story was as good.

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.

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.

If you like this one, you'll love "Home Fires"

Our natures determine who we are. The way we see the world whether through our passions, intuition, reason or rational thought (logic) makes our basic essence. The two main characters in this story have different essences and they and their family must learn to adapt or separate. Sometimes, reality is more complex than fiction will allow and our nature is changed by adding another unit. Unfortunately, for the protagonists in this story that is not the case.

It turns out that truth can be stranger than fiction and a true story with all the same kinds of characters this book contains has already been written by the founder of Audible, Donald Katz, in the book "Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America". I would even bet that Anne Tyler was inspired by that book (not that there is anything wrong with that) and loosely based her story on that book, because all the characters within the "Amateur Marriage" have a counterpart within "Home Fires" and their story is more completely told while giving insights to the time period in greater detail.

Truth can enlighten more than fiction and in the case of "Home Fires" it entertains even more than fiction did.

Real life has real lessons

Overall it was interesting walking through the lives of this family. I've never been married but Michael and Pauline remind me of relationships I've been in with people I have not been a good match for. Reminded of the thoughts we ignore, and how we work so hard to let the love we have keep us going day by day. At some point everyone finds their own liberation in this book, though some of it may be set in the sadness of dealing with life. Seemed to be a very real family story with lessons on how to care for ourselves and others, if we are willing to see them in this story. And the narration was done well.

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.

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.