Volume 51, Number 3 · February 26, 2004
Can This Marriage Be Saved?
By Joyce Carol Oates
The Amateur Marriage
by Anne Tyler
Knopf, 306 pp., $24.95
If the term had not been coined to define an essentially surrealist/exotic mode of twentieth-century fiction, 'magical realism' would more accurately describe the considerable emotional power that can be generated by a sudden illumination of meaning in the ordinary, routine, and largely unobserved in our daily lives. Realism is a mimicry of life in the quotidian, not the heroic or the cataclysmic; at its core, the greatest of all dramas can be simply the passage of time. Where the essential strategy of poetry is distillation, the strategy of the realistic novel is accumulation, which is why novels as diverse as Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale, and James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy depend for their effect upon a painstaking if not obsessive recording of minutiae. When the realistic novel works its magic, you won't simply have read about the experiences of fictitious characters, you will have seemed to live them. Your knowledge of their lives transcends their own, for they can only live in chronological time. The experience of reading such fiction when it's carefully composed can be almost literally breathtaking, like being given the magical power of reliving passages of our own lives, indecipherable at the time of being lived.
Review, 3201 words
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