THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 4, 1995 TAG: 9506010496
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY EDITH R. WHITE
LENGTH: Medium: 92 lines
LADDER OF YEARS
ANNE TYLER
Alfred A. Knopf. 326 pp. $24.
ANNE TYLER, author of such delightful and successful novels as The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons and Saint Maybe, has again summoned up the Maryland landscape and a cast of quirky characters to act out the familiar drama of family members out of sorts with one another.
Delia Grinstead is nearly 40, but she is still girlish in appearance and self-concept. The youngest daughter of an old-time physician who practiced out of his home, Delia was her father's favorite. She tended his patients and managed his office. Perhaps she is Cordelia, Shakespeare's dutiful daughter who, among three sisters, loved her aging father the most. But Delia's father was no King Lear, and his recent death has affected her deeply. She is not ready to let anyone move into his bedroom or take his place in her heart.
When Delia was only 17, her father hired a young doctor to share his practice. Sam Grinstead, 33, seemed to Delia and her sisters to be a prince on a white horse. On the first night that he came to dinner, the three girls sat on the couch ``like the king's three daughters in a fairy tale,'' Sam recalls. He chose the youngest and prettiest. Delia was certain they would live happily ever after.
But real life continued instead. Now Delia occupies the same old house and job, reads romances between answering phone calls for her husband, and feels she has lived out her married life ``like a little girl playing house.'' She asks herself: ``When did sweet and cute turn into silly and inefficient?'' Sam and Delia's three children have turned ``hard-shelled and spiky.'' Their mother is an embarrassment to be ignored. Sam is renovating the house without consulting her. She feels ``like a tiny gnat whirring around her family's edges.''
Delia's first call to independence comes when a good-looking man in the supermarket asks her to pretend she is with him just until his estranged wife and her boyfriend leave: ``Even in her daydreams, she wasn't the type to be unfaithful.'' Still, when he calls her very pretty, and says ``You have such a little face, like a flower,'' she becomes conscious of herself as a woman, and not just a functionary in a household.
Tyler is skillful at denoting the little things that pile up to overtake a life. There is no great time of crisis here. Just one moment comes on the beach when Delia feels that her husband and children no longer see her as a person. She walks away, half-hoping they will miss her and call her back.
Days later when the announcement of her disappearance hits the newspaper, Sam and the children reveal how little they noticed about her. They describe her as standing ``5'2'' or possibly 5'5'' '' and weighing either 90 or 110 pounds. Her eyes are ``blue or gray or perhaps green.'' They could not agree on what she was wearing: ``In all probability it was something pink or blue, her husband suggested, either frilled or lacy or looking kind of baby-doll.''
Delia hitches a ride to another town and life, confident that Grandmother Grinstead, ``Iron Mama Eleanor,'' will be admirably able to cope with everything back home. She becomes Miss Grinstead, a defiantly independent individual. She dresses in dark, severe clothes, finds a job and sets out to prove to herself that she is not the ``foolish little whiffet'' they all believe her to be. Nora leaves ``A Doll's House.''
But soon Delia is caught up in another troubled family. She becomes the live-in substitute mother for Noah, a lovable, young lad who is still at an affectionate age. His grandfather lives in Senior City, a retirement home ``organized on the vertical. Feebler we get, higher up we live.'' First floor is the hale-and-hearty. ``Fourth floor is total care.'' This is the ``Ladder of Years'' from which the title comes. Can a person time-trip backward?
The grandfather has tried to descend the ladder by marrying a spunky, young wife and even fathering a son, much to the delight of the retirement-home residents. Delia has tried to go back in time and change. But is it possible? ``How to live in a world where the passage of time holds so much power'' is at the heart of this novel.
Around that heart are lacy frills of witty writing and delightful description. Delia herself is a valentine who wins the reader's heart. Some of Tyler's most perceptive writing describes the cats in Delia's life; and in a way, Delia is catlike. She can find her way to affection and yet be cool, detached, wary. She can have several lives.
Ladder of Years is definitely top-rung Anne Tyler; her readers will enjoy it at every level. MEMO: Edith R. White is a storyteller, artist and librarian who lives in
Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
DIANA WALKER
Anne Tyler produces an affecting tale of one woman's angst in her
latest novel, ``Ladder of Years.''
by CNB