One of the things I’m most proud of in my life as a reader is that I became an Anne Tyler fan way, way back in 1964, when I discovered her very first book If Morning Ever Comes (published when she was 21). I grew increasingly taken with her quirky characters and oddish plots, through The Tin Can Tree (one of the saddest of the novels); A Slipping Down Life (which never got the movie it deserved), through The Clock Winder, Celestial Navigation, Searching for Caleb, and Earthly Possessions. (Still today, The Clock Winder, Searching for Caleb, and Earthly Possessions are on my best of all time book list.)

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Although I was not in love with Morgan’s Passing (perhaps it’s time to read it again to see if I’ve changed my opinion), I thought Tyler regained her strengths in both Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist. After that though, I have to say that while I read into each book as it came out, I no longer felt as taken with any of them. Either Tyler got tired or I did. The characters weren’t remaining in my mind; the plots seemed rehashes of other books. But still, I continued to read them – there was always a description, a dialogue, or a sentence or two that caught my eye. Which is fortunate, because otherwise I might have missed her newest novel.


While her other books are pretty narrowly focused--families living in the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore--Anne Tyler, in Digging to America is working on a broader canvas, dealing with larger themes than simply quirky families and their interpersonal relationships. The novel tells the story of the Yazdans (totally assimilated Iranian émigrés) and the Donaldsons, a seemingly typical American family – who meet when they are both at the Baltimore airport in 1997 waiting for the arrival of their adopted infant daughters from Korea. As always, in just a paragraph or two Tyler brings the two couples and their extended families to life; we spend time with them over the next 7 years, especially when the extended families get together to celebrate the arrival of Jin-Ho and Susan at an increasingly elaborate annual party that the families take turns hosting. (The rituals – Bitsy Donaldson is big on rituals--include singing “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain” and watching the videos that were taken as the babies were brought off the plane and handed to their new parents.) Of all the characters (and it’s a big cast), it’s the reserved and attractive grandmother Maryam Yazdan, who becomes the focal point of the story. Having left Iran as a young bride 40 years before to come to the U.S. to live with her Iranian physician husband, Maryam remains conflicted and uncomfortable about Americans, who, she believes, persist in seeing and labeling her as “different.” It’s through her thoughts and experiences that Tyler offers up some of her most pointed comments about the way American society treats outsiders. In any Tyler novel, it’s a given that there’s going to be some sorrow and some humor. I won’t give away the sorrowful parts, but I have to mention the one laugh-out-loud chapter in which Bitsy Donaldson decides that it’s time for her youngest daughter to give up her pacifiers and comes up with a plan to make the seemingly impossible happen. No parent of pacifier-sucking kids will want to miss this – it’s priceless.