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I wonder how many people have finished an Anne Tyler novel and thought, "I could write like that," only to goggle at a blank piece of paper for an hour and then scratch out four or five doomed attempts. Imitating Anne Tyler is like bumbling around the local ice rink after watching Michelle Kwan: sure to make you feel stupid. The genius of Tyler's art lies in its illusion of artlessness. 

Digging to America By Anne Tyler Knopf 288 pp., $24.95

And to some extent, Tyler's illusion of artlessness rests in the familiarity of her material. Most of her novels have focused on "ordinary" people: middle-class, secular suburbanites, a slice of America familiar to anybody with a television. But under the familiar surface of Tyler's writing flows the mingled currents of affection and pain that fill every human life: the universal drama of family love, the struggle to be loyal to one group of people over many years.  Family turmoil is the hinge on which Tyler's stories swing: her characters strive toward and against one another, sometimes changing emotional direction within a single sentence. This is a private turbulence we all understand, never mind the many things that divide us. Fiction, at least, offers some catharsis.

Digging to America, Tyler's seventeenth novel, is another chronicle of families in flux. This time, though, she casts her gaze a little wider, bringing together two very different family cultures: the Donaldsons, her usual group of educated, white Baltimoreans, and the Yazdans, a young Iranian American couple who want very much to be all-American, to be "ordinary." The two families converge at the airport on the day they bring home their adopted Korean daughters, who arrive on the same plane.  Tyler makes us spectators at a scene initially dominated by Donaldson relatives with cameras and baby paraphenalia:

Step around the bend, then, and you'd come upon what looked like a gigantic baby shower. The entire waiting area for the flight from San Francisco was packed with people bearing pink- and blue-wrapped gifts, or hanging onto flotillas of silvery balloons printed with IT'S A GIRL! and trailing spirals of pink ribbon. A man gripped the wicker handle of a wheeled and skirted bassinet… and a woman stood ready with a stroller so chrome-trimmed and bristling with levers that it seemed capable of entering the Indy 500. At least half a dozen people held video cameras… A woman spoke into a tape recorder in an urgent, secretive way… MOM, the button on the woman's shoulder read—one of those laminated buttons such as you might see in an election year.

Brian and Bitsy Donaldson greet their baby daughter amid flashbulbs and tears; then a voice calls out "Yazd-dun" ("Yaz-dan" another voice corrects) and the crowd parts to let a second adoptive family through:

Three people no one had noticed before approached in single file: a youngish couple, foreign looking, olive-skinned and attractive, followed by an older woman with a chignon of sleek black hair knotted low on the nape of her neck.

The older woman is Sami's widowed mother, Maryam, whose composed correctness is like an exclamation point on the shyness of her son and daughter-in-law.

The Donaldsons and Yazdans seem so different on the surface: one family group supremely confident, the other uncertain and careful. Such superficial differences are nothing, though, when set against the powerful shared experience of that Arrival Day (an event that will be celebrated by both families for years to come). Soon, Brian and Bitsy invite Ziba and Sami over to their house for "leaf-raking." This sounds to Maryam like "some idiomatic expression having to do with socializing. Break the ice, mend fences, chew the fat, rake leaves." But the invitation is literal. The families work side by side in the autumn leaves, and before a long a friendship begins which will grow right along with the children.

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August (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50