Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler

Most of Anner Tyler’s work can be reviewed with a single sentence: If you enjoy Anner Tyler, you will enjoy this Anne Tyler book. I do like Anne Tyler – I like the small details of her character’s lives and their frustratingly human actions, so I’m really pleased to see the marketing push around her newest book – French Braid; just released – and the efforts to brand her as “America’s Jane Austen” (even though she’s very much not a Romance novelist).

Ladder of Years is the frustrating, amusing and terrifically-written story of Delia Grinstead, a forty-odd-year-old woman who walks away from her life – her GP husband; her almost adult children – and keeps going. In the small town where she makes her home, she finds a new way, with new friends and new prospects.

I was very much on board with Delia’s urge to walk away from her life. It’s done so quietly, so incidentally, so understandably – I feel rather tempted myself. Why do people require me to know what’s for dinner, constantly? Why am I in charge of the emotional labour? Why can I not simply rent a room somewhere, buy myself a new dress, and spend my evenings reading library books?

Ladder of Years is written with a gentle gloss of amusement. Things that should be terrible are not. Events are not impactful life-breaking disasters, even when in real life they might be. Time moves forward and the characters with it. Their emotions feel small, their new circumstances manageable. This will either appeal or not.

The deal-breaker for many readers – which I think is true for a lot of Anne Tyler’s books – will be the lack of resolution. This is Literary Fiction and Tyler has a shelf full of awards and nominations to prove it. Problems in Literary Fiction do not exist to solved, they exist to exist: Tyler’s characters do not seek to tackle their problems or even push back, particularly. They hang question marks in the air. Delia is frustrating for the conversations she doesn’t have, and for the decisions she avoids making, and it is because Tyler is such a brilliant writer of 3d characters that I am so annoyed by this. I wanted her to do things, but this would be missing the point and the intention.

I was, unpleasantly, frustrated by how old-fashioned the characters felt. Ladder of Years was published in 1996 – Twister was at the cinema, and Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood was published – but Delia feels like somebody from ten, maybe twenty years earlier in the way she accepts her lot and her role, despite her unhappiness with it. She doesn’t question, but then, she is an Anne Tyler character, and this is par for the course.

I loved Ladder of Years, and I’ll be gradually continuing my way through Tyler’s backlist. This is not a flawed book, but it’s a not something everybody will enjoy. However, if you like Anne Tyler, you’ll like this Anne Tyler book.