Publisher's Synopsis
With the movie version of "The Accidental Tourist" and the awarding of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to "Breathing Lessons", Anne Tyler has achieved widespread success. Joseph Voelker argues that Tyler's work also deserves serious attention, and his study of her novels and most significant short stories reveals Tyler's subtle but compelling narrative artistry.;Voelker sees Tyler's Quaker background as important to her development as a storyteller who acknowledges the autonomy of her characters, differentiates little between them on account of gender and provides them with a domestic space comparable to the closed communities of the Quakers. As Voelker demonstrates, she frequently initiates her narratives with a phobic moment and then explores the most conservative dimensions of the human psyche, those which Freud called the death instincts.;Exploring Tyler's connections with writers such as John Updike and Eudora Welty, Voelker argues that Tyler experiments - underneath a very realistic surface - with narrative voice, point of view and temporal distortion, in her effort to provide the quiet occasion in which her characters may state the insights they seem to earn for themselves.
