Silly Little Country

Digging to America

What a book! I discovered it as I followed SillyWife on a grocery shopping expedition and I strayed into the cheap paperback section.

I am a third of the way through and I cannot recall anything half so satisfying in the last many years!

It is an utterly brilliant book about how we chafe against one another and learn to live together and even love one another. At so many levels. There is the intercultural, but there is also the intracultural, and even more so, the intrafamilial. And she does this, creating not a single character to dislike. Simply stunning. She also has no problem that cultural differences occur across groups long established geographically here.

I may join Norm's club of trying to read Anne Tyler on schedule.

I think this is the most profoundly American of her books; and what I mean by that is an immigrant society that sees itself as such. It is clearly marked by the fact that her late husband was Iranian, and utter intelligence and compassion flows through it.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 12:22 PM