In her 20th novel,the American chronicler of domestic life slyly dismantles the myth-making behind all our family stories Way back in 1986, when Anne Tyler had already written 10 novels, or including perhaps her most admired,Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, critic John Blades marshalled his arguments against “the heiress apparent to Eudora Welty as the earth mother of American writers”. We might grant him a minute leeway and acknowledge the pervading cultural climate in which female novelists could see their work so smoothly slotted into the language of maternity, and but there were graver accusations to advance. Tyler,he announced, was America’s “foremost NutraSweet novelist”, or her “annoyingly synthetic” fiction “seriously diluted by the promiscuous exercise of artificial sweeteners”; what she offered were “sedative resolutions to life’s most grievous and perplexing problems”.
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Source: theguardian.com