Breathing Lessons
by Anne Tyler
Summary
Maggie and Ira Moran drive from Baltimore to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania, for the funeral of the husband of Maggie's oldest friend, and then drive home. That is the entire novel, one day, with the rest of a marriage folded into it.
Maggie works in a nursing home, is warm, well meaning and constitutionally unable to leave anything alone. On the way back she decides to repair her son Jesse's ruined marriage, and detours to collect his former wife Fiona and their small daughter on the strength of a plan she has not thought through and will not abandon. Ira, who runs a picture framing shop and supports two relatives who will never leave, plays solitaire in his head and lets her, up to a point.
The funeral itself is one of the great comic set pieces in American fiction: the widow asks the guests to perform the songs from her wedding, thirty years on, and they do.
There is also a long stretch in the middle where Maggie's meddling with a stranger on the highway leaves them following an elderly Black man down a farm road for reasons that make no sense to Ira and perfect sense to Maggie, and the argument that follows is the truest thing in the book.
Tyler writes about ordinary decency without a trace of condescension, and the novel is very funny for long stretches while quietly accounting for two people who did not get the lives they expected and are not going to say so.
It is short, around three hundred pages, plainly written and completely undemanding to read, which is why it is regularly underrated. Nobody learns anything and nothing is resolved, because a marriage does not resolve. Best for readers who want domestic fiction that takes small lives entirely seriously.
Historical Context & Significance
Breathing Lessons won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was Anne Tyler's eleventh novel, and she had been a Pulitzer finalist twice already, for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist, the latter having taken the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1985.
Tyler has published more than twenty novels and set nearly all of them in Baltimore, working to a routine of longhand drafts and giving almost no interviews or public readings across a career of sixty years, which has made her one of the least publicly visible major American novelists.
The Pulitzer arrived in the same period as the film of The Accidental Tourist, and the two together moved her from a writer critics admired to one whose new books arrived as events.