Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, centers on the nearly empty nest of Ira and Maggie Moran, their struggles through middle-age, and how each one copes with the disappointments life has shown them. The novel opens early on a Saturday morning in which Ira and Maggie will drive from their home in Baltimore to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania for the funeral of Max, the husband of Maggie's best friend, Serena. To add to the existential crisis, the very next day they are set to take their younger child, Daisy, off to college.

Things go awry right from the start. Maggie has to rush to the body shop to pick up their recently-refinished Dodge before they can head to Pennsylvania, and once in the car is immediately distracted by a radio talk show:

A soft voice on the radio said, "Well, I'm about to remarry? The first time was purely for love? It was genuine, true love and it didn't work at all. Next Saturday I'm marrying for security."

Maggie looked over at the dial and said, "Fiona?"

She meant to brake, but accelerated instead and shot out of the garage and directly into the street. A Pepsi truck approaching from the left smashed into her left front fender--the only spot that had never, up till now, had the slightest thing go wrong with it.

Fiona, as it turns out, is Maggie's former daughter-in-law. The dissolution of her marriage to Maggie's son, Jesse, and the subsequent removal of Maggie and Ira's granddaughter, Leroy, from their lives, is a gaping wound in Maggie's life that the intervening years have failed to heal. Maggie is convinced that Jesse and Fiona still love each other, and that she can bring about a reconciliation. Unfortunately, there is a striking imbalance in Maggie's ability to convince herself and her ability to convince others, and her perpetual meddling has netted few results. When Ira pulls off to a roadside cafe to check his map (he is convinced he can find a faster way to Deer Lick), Maggie spills her heart out to the waitress who serves her coffee:

"[Jesse] took up singing with a hard-rock band. He dropped out of high school and collected a whole following of girls and finally one particular girl and then he married her; nothing wrong with that. Brought her to live in our house because he wasn't making much money. I was thrilled. They had a darling little baby. Then his wife and baby moved out on account of this awful scene, just up and left. It was nothing but an argument really, but you know how those can escalate. I said, 'Ira, go after her; it's your fault she went.' (Ira was right in the thick of that scene and I blame him to this day.) But Ira said no, let her do what she liked. He said let them just go on and go, but I felt she had ripped that child from my flesh left a big torn spot behind."

Suffice it to say that Maggie's version of these events is rather selective, and her own role in the drama is largely ignored in her own account. As more of the family history is revealed in subsequent chapters, one gets the sense that Maggie's meddling, obvious from the start, often descended into outright manipulation. Without ill intentions, she has a way of choosing convenient facts, slicing up memories, and leaving out the rest in a way that blows up in her face time and time again:

So here she was alone. Well! She brushed a tear from her lashes. She was in trouble with everybody in this house, and she deserved to be; as usual she had acted pushy and meddlesome. And yet it hadn't seemed like meddling while she was doing it. She had simply felt as if the world were tiniest bit out of focus, the colors not quite within the lines--something like a poorly printed newspaper ad--and if she made the smallest adjustment then everything would settle perfectly into place.

While the events surrounding Fiona's departure (and the echoing consequences) are the underlying force driving the narrative, the details are held in suspense for much of the novel. In the meantime, Maggie and Ira arrive and attend the funeral, a bizarre re-make of Serena and Max's wedding, with funeral guests singing the same songs they sang at the wedding. Interrupting this narrative are frequent flashbacks, such as to the early years of Maggie and Ira's courtship.

Tyler temporarily shifts the narrative from Maggie to Ira in the second section of the book, giving us the opportunity to compare the couple's disparate perspectives in a way they themselves cannot. Ira's had his own share of burdens; just on the brink of setting out on his own path, his father announced his retirement at the family picture framing shop and handed the business to Ira. Ira also inherited the burden of supporting his sisters, one of whom is mentally handicapped and the other an agoraphobe.

One theme that emerges quite subtly is the strength of Ira and Maggie's marriage. They fight frequently and they have caused each other a great deal of grief. But their marriage has survived, and there are several scenes throughout the book which shows how well they fit together, even if they don't always realize it. It is a marriage whose strength manifests in the sort of ordinary, taken for granted, leaning on one another's shoulders kind of way.