Extraordinary People

I finished Ann Tyler's Searching for Caleb and I must say it was a very good book! The characters were very strange but interesting, and I got involved in their dilemmas.  All worked out well in the end, though, so I highly recommend this book.  Next on my list: Bloods.

Here's a review of Searching for Caleb that came out in The New York Times in 1975. I think it beautifully captures the book's essence:

January 3, 1975

Searching For Caleb

By KATHA POLLITT

It's hard to classify Anne Tyler's novels. They are Southern in their sure sense of family and place but lack the taste for violence and the Gothic that often characterizes self- consciously Southern literature. They are modern in their fictional techniques, yet utterly unconcerned with the contemporary moment as a subject, so that, with only minor dislocations, her stories could just as well have taken place in the twenties or thirties. The current school of feminist-influenced novels seems to have passed her by completely: her women are strong, often stronger than the men in their lives, but solidly grounded in traditional roles. Among our better contemporary novelists, Tyler occupies a somewhat lonely place, polishing brighter and brighter a craft many novelists no longer deem essential to their purpose: the unfolding of character through brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail.

In "Searching for Caleb" she has invented a family whose very conventionality borders on the eccentric. The Pecks of Baltimore are wealthy, standoffish, stolidly self-satisfied. In their suburban enclave of wide lawns and spacious houses, for generations have lived quietly together tactfully ignoring a world they consider loud and frivolous and full of rude people with outlandish surnames.

To be a true Peck is to sink into a kind of lukewarm bath that is comforting but enervating, a perpetual childhood presided over by the brisk, formal, aging grandfather, Daniel. Only two have rebelled: Caleb, Daniel's dreamy, cello-playing brother, who disappeared without a trace 60 years ago, and Duncan, Daniel's grandson, a wild boy in love with scrapes and danger who grows into a strange, private, restless adult.

When Duncan marries his cousin Justine, hitherto an ardent Peck, she begins to discover her own thirst for adventure. For years the two careen through the small towns of Maryland and Virginia as Duncan quits one makeshift job for another. He refuses to acknowledge the past that propels them both into an ever bleaker and dingier future. Justine is pulled both forward and back: an amateur teller of fortunes who advises her clients always to go along with change, she remains in thrall to her own childhood. And so, when Daniel decides to find his lost brother, Justine is the one who joins him. For the old man the quest is a way of recapturing the past, but for Justine it becomes a search for the self she has mislaid. The outcome is marvelously ironic, since the answers to her questions are themselves enigmatic. Yet she emerges triumphant, her own woman at last.

Less perfectly realized than "Celestial Navigation," her extraordinarily moving and beautiful last novel, "Searching for Caleb" is Tyler's sunniest, most expansive book. While etching with a fine, sharp wit the narrow-mindedness and pettishness of the Pecks, she lavishes on them a tenderness that lifts them above satire. Consider Daniel Peck. A cold and unoriginal man, aging gracefully but without wisdom, he is yet allowed moments in which we glimpse his bewilderment at a life that has been in the end disappointing: "In my childhood I was trained to hold things in, you see. But I thought I was holding them in until a certain time. I assumed that someday, somewhere, I would again be given the opportunity to spend all that save-up feeling. When will that be?"

Reading "Searching for Caleb," one is constantly being startled by such moments: gestures, words, wrinkles of thought and feeling that are at once revelatory and exactly right. But at the center of Tyler's characters is a private, mysterious core which is left, wisely, inviolate. Ultimately this wisdom is what makes Tyler more than a fine crafts- man of realistic novels. Her complex, crotchety inventions surprise us, but one senses they surprise her too.

Katha Pollitt is a reviewer of contemporary fiction.