Books like Ladder of Years

If Ladder of Years isn't already one of my favorite novels, The Last Picture Show and The Remains of the Day can see it in their rearview mirrors. Taken together, each novel documents the human experience at critical points, ages 18, 45 and 65, perhaps. Anne Tyler's compulsively absorbing comic drama published in 1995 fulfills the middle chapter. Membership in that age demographic is not required to become enraptured with Tyler's effortless wit, keen naturalism or existential questioning, nor is it needed to get caught up her protagonist's decision to walk away from life as she knows it and start fresh.The story begins in the suburbs of Baltimore. Delia Grinstead shops for her family's groceries, lost in thought in the produce section about how oddly vegetables are named. A younger man approaches and begins to chat with her. Terrified that he might be trying to pick her up, he offers the name Adrian Bly-Brice and reveals that he's spotted his ex-wife in the store with the accountant she left him for. He asks Delia to pretend that she's his girlfriend. She enthusiastically agrees but introduced to Rosemary Bly-Brice, begins to dwell on her own imperfections, pushing a cart while the immaculate Rosemary carries a hand cart. Delia returns to a family in Roland Park she feels invisible to. Her caring and aloof husband Sam is a doctor who took over both the house and later, the medical practice of Delia's father, who died four months ago. Her three nearly adult children live at home: Susie is a Goucher College junior, Ramsay a freshman at John Hopkins close to flunking out due to his relationship with a single mother, and fifteen-year-old Carroll has entered his non-communicative phase. Her sister Eliza, a librarian proud of her intellect, also lives with them. While her family reprimand her for bothering them with phone messages that Delia realizes are at least a week old, her thoughts turn to Adrian, to something new.She took to stepping into the yard several times a day. She seized any excuse to arrange herself on the front-porch swing. Never an outdoor person, and most certainly not a gardener, she spent half an hour posed it goatskin gloves among Eliza's medicinal herbs. And after someone telephoned but merely breathed and said nothing when she answered, she jumped up at every new call like a teenager. "I'll get it! I'll get it!" When there weren't any calls, she made a teenager's bargains with Fate: I won't think about it, and then the phone will ring. I'll go out of the room; I'll pretend I'm busy and the phone will ring for sure. Shepherding her family into the car for a Sunday visit to Sam's mother, she moved fluidly, like an actress or a dancer conscious of every minute of being watched.But if someone really had been watching, think of what he would see: the ragged disarray of Delia's home life. Ramsay, short and stone-faced and sullen, kicking a tire in disgust; Carroll and Susie bickering over who would get a window seat; Sam settling himself behind the wheel, pushing his glasses higher on his nose, wearing an unaccustomed knit shirt that made him look weak-armed and fussy. And at the end of their trip, the Iron Mama (as Delia called her)--sturdy, plain Eleanor Grinstead, who patched her own roof and mowed her own lawn and had reared her one son single-handed in that spotless Calvert Street row house where she waited now, lips clamped tight, to hear what new piece of tomfoolery her daughter-in-law had contrived.Unable to sleep, Delia goes for a walk and runs into Adrian, taking his dog for a pee. He invites her over for tea and their visits take on the awkwardness of a high school affair, with Delia stealing away minutes to be taken in Adrian's arms and kissed before she flees. Her Eurocentric sister Linda arrives with her twins Marie-Claire and Thérèse for the family's annual trip to a cottage on the Delaware shore. Sam answers the door and brings in a woman who identifies herself as Adrian's mother. She warns Delia to stay away from her son, who she claims is working things out with his wife. The idea that Delia could be involved with another man is a joke to her family.On the beach, Delia realizes that Adrian never pursued her and that their brief "affair" was little more than happenstance, full of clues into his character that she chose to overlook. Her marriage comes to a head when Sam insists on lathering her in sunblock, continues his annoying habit of deliberately mispronouncing names ("Adrian Fried Rice") and walking away from Delia after riling her up in anger. Fed up, she takes a walk on the beach and returns to the cottage, where she encounters a repairman who shares the same name as her cat--Vernon. He shows off his vehicle, an RV he's borrowed from his brother. Delia is mesmerized by the prospect of a mobile home. She asks Vernon if she can ride with him inland, where Delia claims she has family. Wearing a scrunchy swimsuit, her espadrilles, her husband's beach robe and carrying a tote bag with a cosmetics kit and $500 cash, she asks to get off in the town of Bay Borough. Planning on staying the night, she buys underwear from a dime store and a dress from a consignment shop. The woman staring back at Delia in the mirror looks somber and serious-minded, a librarian or secretary, perhaps. She finds a room for rent by a bachelorette real estate agent named Belle Flint and still wearing sunblock, a minimum wage job as secretary for a stuffy attorney. Delia decides to stay a while longer. She took to sitting on her bed in the evenings and staring into space. It was too much to say that she was thinking. She certainly had no conscious thoughts, or at any rate, none that mattered. Most often she was, oh, just watching the air, as she used to do when she was small. She used to gaze for hours at those multicolored specks that swarm in a room's atmosphere. Then Linda informed her they were dust motes. That took the pleasure out of it, somehow. Who cares about mere dust? But now she thought Linda was wrong. It was air she watched, an infinity of air endlessly rearranging itself, and the longer she watched the more soothed she felt, the more mesmerized, the more peaceful.She was learning the value of boredom. She was clearing out her mind. She had always known that her body was just a shell she lived in, but it occurred to her now that her mind was yet another shell--in which case, who was "she"? She was clearing out her mind to see what was left. Maybe there would be nothing.Delia wondered if Sam knew that Carroll was scheduled for tennis lessons the middle two weeks in July. You couldn't depend on Carroll to remember on his own. And did anyone recall that this was dentist month? Well, probably Eliza did. Without Eliza, Delia could never left her family so easily.She wasn't sure if that was something to be thankful for.The fact was, Delia was expendable. She was an extra. She had lived out her married life like a little girl playing house, and always there'd be a grown-up standing ready to take over--her sister or her husband or her father.Logically, she should have found that a comfort. (She used to be afraid of dying while her children were so small.) But instead, she had suffered pangs of jealousy. Why was it Sam, for instance, that everybody turned to in times of crisis? He always got to be the reasonable one, the steady and reliable one; she was purely decorative. But how had that come about? Where had she been looking while that state of affairs developed?Whether toeing the line between drama and comedy, or literary fiction and romance, Anne Tyler is so good at demonstrating how great fiction is achieved by a matter of degrees and good taste. Pumped up with self-importance or literary pretension, Ladder of Years would be boring and insufferable. Conformed to convention or expectation--every male character Delia meets on her journey presents the opportunity for her to run off on some wacky romance--the same story would be lukewarm junk. Instead of following literary trends, Tyler follows the rhythms of a bittersweet life, attendant with security and health but also deep and painful regret, sometimes tragic, often comic.Delia planned to go next to the Gobble-Up for some lunch things, but just as she was leaving the house a young man in uniform arrived on the porch. She thought at first he was some kind of soldier; the uniform was a khaki color, and his hair was prickly short. "Miz Grinstead?" he said."Yes.""I'm Chuck Akers, from the Polies."It took her a moment to translate that."Think I could have a word with you?" he asked."Certainly," she said. She turned to lead him inside and then realized she had nowhere to take him. Her bedroom was out of the question, and she couldn't very well use Belle's living room. So she turned back and asked, "What can I do for you?" and they ended up conducting their business right there on the porch."You are Miz Cordelia F. Grinstead," he said."Yes.""I understand you came here of your own free will.""Yes. I did.""Nobody kidnapped you, coerced you ...""Nobody else had anything to do with it.""Well, I surely wish you had thought to make that clear before you left.""I'm sorry," she said. "Next time I will."Next time!She wondered when on earth she supposed that would be.Tyler's great strength is taking characters I ordinarily would not care about and investing me in the outcome of their decisions. Uptight White Anglo Saxon Protestants in suburban Baltimore who seem like they might faint if they saw a homeless person or heard a four-lettered word ("Oh, Lord" being a frequent curse) still put their pants on one leg at a time and I related to Delia Grinstead. Most of us have thought about walking away from our lives and to start over, or wondered what life would be like if we were someone else. With Ladder of Years, Tyler takes us on that journey, without sprinkling any artificial flavors or plot elements. I believed her and was believably moved by her novel.