"What if?" is a question that looms large in the world of Anne
Tyler --- in fact, for better or worse, it is the defining question
of her oeuvre. What if I risk it all for romance, what if I carve
someone's name into my forehead, what if I just leave my house and
walk away into another life... The "What if" of BACK WHEN WE WERE
GROWNUPS, her latest book, is completed by "I realized that I was
living the wrong life." Serious business this, what we have done
with our lives, the choices made, the choices not made...
And Tyler, who can make an everyday trip to the supermarket almost
drown in epic amounts of importance and opportunity, offers much of
the same here.

Not to say that Tyler's work is boring just because there are
themes to which she returns time and again. It is absolutely the
opposite --- imagine what the work of Woody Allen would be without
the intellectual New York snob versus the everyday guy from
Flatbush dichotomy that he has milked throughout his entire career.
Tyler's ability to draw from the same well and create yet another
huge family of insanely vivid characters (although with each book,
the younger characters come out looking dumber and more
self-obsessed than the elder characters) is never-ending, a depth
of talent with which few novelists work today. Although her last
book, A PATCHWORK PLANET, left a great deal to be desired in its
not-so-loveable protagonist, BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWNUPS offers us
the engaging Beck, a party planner in her 50s who lives to make
others' lives happy and celebratory. She suddenly realizes that the
life she is living bears little to no resemblance to the one she
had always imagined living --- and thus sets out to right this
wrong before it's too late.

When Beck takes her chances at getting it right later on down the
road, Tyler has drawn the reader in with her brand of sharp,
pointed and seemingly small details of life --- a woman without
children who has Raggedy Anns scattered about her living room, the
fancy hors d'oeuvres Beck's stepdaughter brings to a picnic where
everybody just wants hamburgers --- and we are with Beck every step
of the way, egging her on, hoping and wishing that she will get
what she wants. BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWNUPS offers a stunningly
heartfelt look at a kind of redemption that past generations were
unable to enact without a great deal of guilt, the ability to
switch horses in midstream and go backwards to the place where
their original dreams had started to take shape, in the hope that
they will be readily resurrected. It is a daring place for anyone
but particularly so for one of Tyler's stay-at-home Baltimoreans,
usually happy to just be and go on with life as it is. Beck risks,
and we are all the better for it.

Turning the humdrum into a philosophical, emotionally twisted and
complicated conundrum is Anne Tyler's specialty. It's what she won
the Pulitzer Prize for, it's why her books are always on the
bestseller lists. BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWNUPS is yet another step on
the ladder to her enduring and endearing legacy as a truly American
novelist.