Oh, the places we’ve been. It’s too bad life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. As soon as we get one life lesson down, another one rolls in and blindsides us. Wouldn’t it be great if someone published the complete set of cradle-to-the-grave how-to books?
No one feels this lack as deeply as Anne Tyler, whose novels so often hint at the missing skills required to make sense of what happens to us: “Breathing Lessons,” “Noah’s Compass,” or the travel guides of “The Accidental Tourist.”
In her 19th novel, “The Beginner’s Goodbye,” Tyler offers a deceptively simple story about a man who learns everything he knows about life from losing his wife.
Stuffy, quaint and, like many a Tyler leading man, old before his time, 35-year-old Aaron Woolcott has been married to Dorothy for 11 years when a freak accident ends her life. Though an odd pair -- they both shied away from emotional displays and traditional married routines -- the two were inseparable and Aaron still hasn’t gotten over his loss.
“I felt as if I’d been erased, as if I’d been ripped in two,” he says, scorning the efforts of family and friends who urge him “to ‘get over my loss,' ‘find closure,’ ‘move on,’ all those ridiculous phrases people use when they’re urging you to endure the unendurable.”
Then, a year after her death, Dorothy reappears, first briefly and then for longer periods of time.
As the book opens, she and Aaron have taken to “strolling through Belvedere Square” together in Baltimore, where the story takes place. Other people can see Dorothy, Aaron believes, but are too polite or startled to comment.
Unsure but desperate, Aaron accepts the miracle: “Put yourself in my place,” he says. “Call to mind a person you’ve lost that you will miss to the end of your days, and then imagine happening on that person out in public. ... Your little brother who fell through the ice the winter he was six, let’s say, passes by with his smell of menthol cough drops and damp mittens. You wouldn’t question your sanity, because you couldn’t bear to think this wasn’t real.”
But “The Beginner’s Goodbye” is not a ghost story and, in fact, Dorothy’s ghost is offstage for most of the first half of the book, in which Aaron recounts the story of her death, then works backward to explain his early life, how he met his wife and the reasons for their unusual and clinically cool relationship, an arrangement with its origins in Aaron’s childhood.
In the aftermath of a stroke at age 2 that paralyzed his right side, Aaron spent years trying to be “normal” in the face of his handicaps, fending off his overprotective mother and sister. His phobia of anything that might be interpreted as coddling explains why his marriage to Dorothy, a busy radiologist, was one of exaggerated self-sufficiency.
Tyler underlines this theme repeatedly throughout the book. Aaron, for instance, an editor in his family’s small publishing business, is solely responsible for the Woolcotts’ most successful line, a popular DIY series called "The Beginner’s" books.
Like the “For Dummies” books, they are how-to books about common subjects -- “but classier,” Aaron explains, and “more focused," -- sometimes absurdly so. “Even life’s most complicated lessons,” Aaron observes, are “manageable if ... divided into small enough increments.” Thus their series: “Not The Beginner’s Cookbook, but The Beginner’s Soups ... not The Beginner’s Childcare, but The Beginner’s Colicky Baby.”
Far too many unanticipated life events, Tyler suggests, leave us in the lurch: Unforeseen childhood diseases require better instructions. Dating could use a manual. Marriage needs one. Menopause definitely needs one. She has great fun with How-To overkill in one scene where the family brainstorms a “Beginner’s start-to-finish, cradle-to-grave living” series: every book in their catalog packaged as a lavish boxed set, a life-long instruction manual at the ready. “Not yet ready for the breastfeeding book, or the divorce book?” Just wait: they’ll come in handy.
Meanwhile, in typical Tyler fashion, not much happens on the surface of the novel. Aaron moves in with his unmarried sister, Nandina, while the contractor he hires to restore his house, damaged in the accident, makes meaningful changes to its layout. A budding romance between Nandina and the contractor triggers Aaron’s memories of his own, decidedly unromantic relationship.
But it’s always within the ho-hum that Tyler finds the best opportunities to invoke a sea change. Dorothy’s visits eventually lead Aaron to some uncomfortable realizations about their marriage, the countless “crossed signals and faulty timing,” how many times they disappointed each other, the way they “just never quite got the hang of being a couple the way other people did.”
In this wonderfully awkward and honest backward glance, Tyler captures one of the most poignant of all rifts between couples: When despite every effort, neither can puzzle out how to love each other except from a distance.
The ending of “The Beginner’s Goodbye” seems a little forced, especially for a book that so accurately nails the imperfections and ambiguities inherent in relationships, and the wide swings of guilt and regret that accompany grief. Perhaps it’s just the way the manual expects the finished product to look -- not the one we end up with when we do it ourselves.
Anne Tyler grew up in Raleigh and has lived in Baltimore since 1967.
Fiction
"The Beginner’s Goodbye"
Anne Tyler
Random House, $24.95, 208 pages
