Personal Response

I first picked this book because my mom owned some of the other Anne Tyler books and enjoyed reading them. The book sounded like it would be a good read based on the synopsis and the reviews that were in the first few pages of the novel:

“A wonderful novel, glowing with the insight and compassion of an artist’s touch.”–The Boston Globe
“Humor is woven into almost every sentence.”–USA Today
“A lustrous work…one can’t help but be swept up!”–Booklist
(all reviews come from pages 1-3 of the novel)

So, the novel came highly praised by critics from a variety of sources. But after reading a few pages of the book, I wasn’t exactly sure why. Nothing really stood out to me in terms of plot, characters, or style of writing. Overall, the storyline seemed kind of bland. There were no plot twists, no exciting turning points, and not even a real climax to the story. I quickly grew bored and struggled to finish reading.

It’s not because I hate to read, because I actually enjoy reading a lot. In fact, I read so much that I currently have piles and piles of books stacked up in front of my actual bookshelf. If I enjoy a book, I can read it in a few hours. I rarely encounter books that I can’t finish reading, but the ironic thing is that if I do find a book I don’t like it is usually widely acclaimed like this one. One of the last books I didn’t finish reading was The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, and it also came with a lot of praises by book critics.

This book was just one that I wanted to banish to the dusty corners of a bookshelf forever. I couldn’t relate to the characters at all, and the constant flashbacks were confusing and almost gave the effect of whiplash. It wasn’t original or groundbreaking in terms of American literature.

Along those same lines, I don’t think this book really had anything to do with American society as a whole. Sure, connections can be drawn here or there, but not without great difficulty, and not ones that apply to the entire population. While the events were more realistic than other novels, they didn’t seem realistic enough. The book was also published in the late 80′s, but didn’t really seem to connect to that time period.

Overall, it just wasn’t that good of a book, and I probably won’t read any more of this author’s writing. Maybe it’s one of those books where you have to be sympathetic to the characters to understand it.

How Age Affects Change

” ‘Isn’t it sad,’ she said, ‘How the young folks are drifting away? Why, Sissy hardly comes home at all since she married.’ “

“It was her first inkling that her generation was part of the stream of time. Just like the others ahead of them, they would grow up and grow old and die. Already there was a younger generation prodding them from behind.”

Through the use of flashbacks in the novel, readers really see how time passes and changes people, sometimes for the better and sometimes for worse.  The events in the novel are interspersed with flashbacks of Maggie and Ira’s life at earlier times.  Some of the flashbacks occur in the recent past, but others occur in the more distant past, when Maggie and Ira first got married. The flashbacks show how the two of them have changed as they age, and how their marriage has changed as well.

Maggie and Ira started dating by mistake. One of the neighborhood gossips told her that Ira had been killed during army training, and since Maggie had been one of his acquaintances during school, she decided to send his father a condolence letter. As it turned out, Ira did not, in fact, die during military training; it was another boy in the neighborhood who had passed away. And thus Maggie and Ira began their sometimes tumultuous relationship.

At first they were very in love, and very naive. But over the years, as the passage of time started to put stress on their marriage, things changed. They became part of the “older” generation, looking at the younger people having the same fun they were having thirty years before. They start to nag at each other when they’re together:

“That Ira is just so stubborn I could spit.”

“And his wife! He loved her, but he couldn’t stand how she refused to take her own life seriously. She seemed to believe it was a sort of practice, something she could afford to play around with as if they offered second or third chances to get it right.”

The trip to the funeral and the video that is shown there remind them of the past and help the two of them realize that there is a reason they got married in the first place. They realize that even though time has passed and they how grown older, it is no reason for them to grow apart.

What’s in a name?

The Title

” ‘Breathing lessons—-really,’ she said, dropping to the floor with a thud. ‘Don’t they reckon I must know how to breathe by now?’ “

Throughout the first three-fourths of the novel, I always wondered what the significance of the title was. After all, they were on a road trip for the entirety of the book, which didn’t leave much room for lessons in breathing. But as the plot continued, the style of writing changed, becoming increasingly written in flashbacks to previous, happier days.

The scene that gives the novel its name occurred shortly before Fiona gave birth to Leroy. Fiona, at the time, was still living in Maggie and Ira’s house with Jesse, and Maggie greatly enjoyed signing her up for all kinds of pregnancy classes. This specific class had to do with breathing. Fiona figured that after twenty years of being alive she knew how to breathe pretty well already without the help of a class.

The title and the story behind it connect to one of the main points of the novel–”breathing” is important. First of all, Maggie needs to give a bit more breathing room to those around her, and stop trying to change them. She also needs to learn how to breathe herself–to take a step back and analyze what is going on around her before she leaps into action and takes the reins. This is an important principle to learn in a “think before you speak” kind of way.

Leroy

Leroy is Fiona and Jesse’s daughter–their only current connection, since they choose to have nothing to do with each other.  Since he rarely sees her, he doesn’t know what kind of person she is or anything about her, really. At her fifth birthday, he brings her a huge stuffed teddybear, dolls, and all kinds of other toys that girls in that age range usually play with. The only problem is, Leroy is a huge tomboy and prefers running around in the mud to playing with dolls.

“So here he comes with this drink-and-wet doll that cries ‘Mama,’ and when he catches sight of Leroy in her dungarees he stops short; you can see he’s not pleased. He says, ‘Who is that?’ He says, ‘But she’s so—’ I had had to run and fetch her from the neighbors and quick smooth down her hair on the way through the alley. In the alley, I told her ‘ Tuck in your shirt honey. Here, let me lend you my barrette,’ and Leroy stood still for it, which she wouldn’t do ordinarily, believe me.”

“Leroy” could easily be a boy’s name, and this is represented in her tomboyish personality and character.

Themes from American Literature

Theme: People always want to see the good side of someone, instead of their faults, shortcomings, and evils.

From the beginning, it is very clear that Maggie likes to interfere in the lives of the people she loves. While she is always well-intentioned, her plans never come out the way she intends for them to. Her main goal in this novel was to get her son Jesse and his ex-wife Fiona back together, which proved to be a difficult task. At their “reunion” dinner, the truth comes out, and many of the lies she told in an attempt to get them back together come to light.

Maggie’s meddling is the fault that Ira notices most about her. He even says, “It’s Maggie’s weakness: She believes it’s alright to alter people’s lives. She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, so she starts changing things around to suit her view of them.” Maggie doesn’t want to believe that the people she surrounds herself with have faults, inner evils, and weaknesses, and she fails to accept the fact that people mess up and aren’t always perfect.

This is a theme that repeats itself in many pieces of American literature. In The Scarlet Letter, for example, the character of Arthur Dimmesdale also fits this theme. He fails to realize until it is too late that the physician Roger Chillingworth is actually his mortal enemy who will be the death of him. While Dimmesdale doesn’t try to change those around him like Maggie, he certainly fails to discern the fact that human beings aren’t perfect. Dimmesdale had trouble seeing that some people have flaws in their character.

This theme is also true of American people today. We always want to consider people as being inherently “good,” not inherently bad. It is hard to accept the fact that most, if not all, people have both good and bad qualities that comprise their character. It is often difficult to understand someone’s flaws, because we always view them as well-intentioned and well-meaning. We always want to think the best of people, but sometimes that has the consequence of losing sight of their real personality.

Image Study

 

Maggie and Ira decide to have dinner with their son Jesse , his ex-wife Fiona, and their daughter Leroy, and the five of them discover that the truth hurts. Fiona and Jesse divorced about seven years ago, and Fiona and Leroy literally ran out of the house and never came back. This dinner was their first time meeting since the incident. They were young when they married, less than twenty years old, and very naive. Jesse had promised to make a cradle for Leroy, but never did.  At one part, Fiona said to Jesse, ” ‘I married you for that cradle.’ ” She left because she figured he would never keep any other promises in their marriage.

When I was little, I used to watch this TV show all the time. At the end of each episode, when Scooby and the gang caught whatever villain they were after, the villain would say something along the lines of, “If it weren’t for you meddling kids…” This reminds me of the way Maggie is always meddling in the lives of the people she loves.  She tries to get to the bottom of the mysteries in her life, but unfortunately, unlike Scooby, she does more harm than good.

At the beginning of the novel, Maggie and Ira are on a road trip to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania for a funeral. Along the way, they experience some turbulence in their relationship.  Maggie continues to claim that she is divorcing Ira because he doesn’t respect her, and he nags at her about her interference in everyone else’s lives.  They also spend a lot of time following a road map of the northeastern United States, but it fails to keep them on track. This shows that no matter how planned out everything in life might be, there is always something that changes or doesn’t go according to plan.

Ira works in a framing shop that has been owned by his family for three generations. It isn’t a glorious job, and he doesn’t make a lot of money. Maggie is very critical of his work, and at times it seems like she is almost trapped in a picture frame herself. She wants everything in her life to be concrete, and rarely ventures out of the four sides of her comfort zone. She is critical of others, but never critical of herself. She is almost trapped behind glass in the way that she looks at people and criticizes their faults and wrongdoings.

The Importance of Setting

Maggie and Ira Moran live in Baltimore, Maryland—the largest town in the state, with almost 100,000 more people than the city of Atlanta.  They don’t seem to fit in there.  They’re slightly old-fashioned and not exactly rich.  They drive a beat-up old car that frequently visits the body shop down the street from their house. Yet author Anne Tyler sculpts the town so that it does fit them.

“In this part of town things were intermingled–small frame houses like theirs sitting among portrait photographers’ studios, one-woman beauty parlors, driving schools, and podiatry clinics.” (Tyler, 4)

Note the text that reads “this part of town.” That phrase signifies the difference between the area the Moran’s live in and the rest of the city of Baltimore. While the city has highrises and skyscrapers, the Moran’s part of town has frame houses and small businesses. This also means that the Moran’s have different problems than people in the big city.

People in the city worry about their job at a big law firm. Maggie and Ira have a small family-owned photography business. People in the city worry about their appointment at the gym later in the day. Maggie is constantly on a diet, but only because she wants to show her husband that she has the self-control to do so. People in the city drive fancy cars. Theirs “needed extensive repairs.”

Another problem that sets them apart from life in the big city is the relationship problems their entire family experiences. Conflicts between Maggie and Ira, their son Jesse and his ex-wife Fiona, and Maggie and Fiona, arise during the novel. The Morans deal with these problems publicly and openly. People in the city hide their problems from the rest of the world. Imagine if this woman who looked like a “chunky little windup toy wheeling along the sidewalk” shared her familial problems with everyone on a subway going to work one day. People would laugh at her, and generally not care about her problems.

Yet when Maggie and Ira travel to Deerlick, PA for a funeral, they seem appalled at the small size. Maggie shows her stereotype of country people by saying:

“Now collections of parked trucks and RV’s appeared in clearings at random intervals–no humans around, no visible explanation for anybody’s stopping there. Maggie had noticed this on her earlier trips and never understood it. Were the drivers off fishing or hunting or what? Did country people have some kind of secret life?” (Tyler, 25)

I think the reason the author had the story set in such a place is that it shows the contrast between the lives of people at different social statuses. Maggie and Ira don’t live in the big city, but they also don’t live in a rural area, either. This shows that their problems are not highly important, but not small and meaningless either.

Symbolism: One Wedding and a Funeral

After a tumultuous car trip to Deerlick, Pennsylvania for the funeral of the husband of Maggie’s best friend (Serena), Maggie and Ira have finally arrived at the church where the funeral is to be held. A brief conversation with Serena results in Maggie and Ira soon being forced to sing “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing” in front of the entire funeral procession. They sang this song at Serena and Max’s wedding many years before. Serena also asks some of the other attendees of the wedding to sing renditions of songs from the 1950′s and 1960′s.

While it may seem commonplace to get an orchestra or choir for a funeral, Serena decides to skip that detail and get the guests to provide their own music. She tells all of the guests that also attended her wedding that they must sing the same song at her husband’s funeral.

” ‘I don’t expect anything professional,’ Serena said. ‘All I want is a kind of rerun, like people sometimes have on their golden anniversaries. I thought it would make a nice touch.’ ” (Tyler, 57).

Thus, Maggie and Ira would be singing “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing” as they did at Serena and Max’s wedding, and other guests would be singing “My Prayer” and reading from “The Prophet.” Serena shuns all the traditional funeral rites and creates her own, not caring about what everyone else seems to think.

Maggie is obviously jealous of the connection that Serena had to her late husband. Even in Max’s later days, as his health started to go, he and Serena were still perfectly happily together.

“Every stage of their lives, it seemed, Serena had experienced slightly ahead of Maggie; and every stage she’d reported on in her truthful, startling, bald-faced way, like some foreigner that didn’t know the etiquette.” (Tyler, 54)

Max and Serena’s relationship symbolizes everything that Maggie wishes her relationship with Ira was. She wishes that she could see her relationship from the outside looking in, like Serena did when Max’s memory started to go. She wishes Ira would care more about her feelings and why she acts the way she does. Serena and Max didn’t have family issues with their children like Ira and Maggie did. They were perfectly content to live in the moment and take life as it came to them.

Personal Response I: The Ability to Change Those Around Us

One of Maggie’s biggest faults is her desire to always be changing those around her so that they can properly fit into her world and her life. The first time readers see this is in the first chapter, when Maggie is discussing her son Jesse’s ex-wife, Fiona, and their daughter, Leroy. Jesse and Fiona used to live with Ira and Maggie in their house in Baltimore, Maryland, but Fiona and her baby moved out after having a fight and getting divorced. This meant that Ira and Maggie could no longer see their grandaughter.

Maggie is convinced that she can bring Fiona and Jesse back together. She says that, “It’s plain as the nose on your face that she and Jesse still love each other. They’ve always loved each other; they never stopped; it’s just that they can’t, oh, connect, somehow.”

Maggie even follows Fiona and Leroy to their new house in Cartwheel, Pennsylvania one day so that she can catch a glimpse of her grandchild. This is all despite the fact that she barely even knew her grandaughter and only saw her once a year after they moved out.

Maggie tries to change those around her because she herself doesn’t want to change. She cannot accept the fact that things in her life have changed, and she fails to move on from disappointment.

This idea is applicable to so many people in the world today. We feel like it is easier to change those around us than to change ourselves. We force our views on other people in an attempt to get them to change, and this drives a wedge between relationships among family and friends. We are quick to blame others for their problems, and by doing this we fail to address our own issues.

Character Study: Ira and Maggie

Two main characters are introduced in the opening chapters of the novel, and they continue to show up for the remainder of the book:

Maggie Moran
Maggie is a woman in her fifties who isn’t sure what to make of her life. She is on a constant diet (” ‘Yes, but I’m on a diet! All I want is a snack!’ “) but never really sticks to it, even though she’s trying to lose those last 10 pounds. Maggie acts without thinking various times throughout the novel. At one point, she and Ira are in the car on the way to a funeral, and when Ira makes a comment about the fact that she practically told her whole life story to a waitress at a restaurant, she demands to be let out of the car.

” ‘Are you going to stop this car,’ she asked, ‘Or do I have to jump from a moving vehicle?’ “

This also shows that she is brave and has a strength of character that a lot of people don’t have. Sometimes this can be a good thing, and sometimes it can be a bad thing.

Maggie’s biggest faults are that she only looks at the positive side of someone’s personality and that she always wants to change people and better their lives. At some level this is a good thing, but she always fails to see her wrongdoings. Her best friend’s husband, Max died recently, and on the way to the funeral, she was thinking that, “He was not the best at holding down a job and he had moved his family often. but he had struck her as the type who stays boyish forever.” She fails to see his faults, and thus her own faults as well.

Ira Moran
Ira and Maggie have been married for 28 years, and it shows in his attitude toward her. At the beginning of the book, Tyler details the couple’s preparation for their trip to a funeral in Pennsylvania. She writes, “Ira figured they should start around eight. This made him grumpy. (He was not an early-morning kind of man.) Also, Saturday was his busiest day and work, and he had no one to cover for him. Also their car was in the body shop. It had needed extensive repairs and Saturday morning at opening time, eight o’clock exactly, was the soonest they could get it back. Ira said maybe they’d just better not go…” Readers can see through this quote how Ira reacts to Maggie’s personality. He tends to be quiet and reserved, while she is dominant in conversations. When Maggie shares her life story with a waitress at a cafe, she says that, “It always embarrassed him when she took up with outsiders.” But Ira has his own way of not being overshadowed by Maggie. He often does little things to annoy her, like playing cards in the church before the funeral service.

There are definitely tensions between Ira and Maggie in the first chapters of the novel. Maggie even says that maybe Ira “should’ve married Ann Landers” when she was angry with him. The two of them disagree about practically everything.

Rhetoric Study: Chapter One

Chaos.

That’s one of the first noticeable things about Anne Tyler’s writing in Chapter 1 of Breathing Lessons.  From the beginning of the novel, readers almost get whiplash from the sudden style changes in Tyler’s writing.  It’s hard to keep up with the transitions from short dialogue to poetic descriptions to meandering thought processes that occur throughout the first chapter and subsequent chapters.

The very first paragraphs of the novel begin with a lengthy and detailed description about the predicament that the two protagonists find themselves in.  It includes inferences about the character’s feelings and hints at outside problems in their relationship without being overwhelming in the opening lines of the book.

“Ira was waiting in front of his store, unfamiliar and oddly dashing in his navy suit.  A shock of ropy black, gray-threaded hair hung over his forehead. Above him a metal sign swung in the breeze: ‘Sam’s Frame Shop.  Picture Framing. Matting.  Your Needlework Professionally Displayed.’ Same was Ira’s father, who had not had a thing to do with the business since coming down with a ‘weak heart’ thirty years before.  Maggie always put ‘weak heart’ in quotation marks.” (Tyler, 6)

When the detailed descriptions are bordering on too long and too detailed, Tyler smartly switches keys, interspersing the paragraphs with terse dialogue.

” ‘Where’d you hear this?’
  ‘On the radio while I was driving.’
‘They’d announce a thing like that on the radio?’
‘She telephoned it in.’ 
‘That seems kind of self important.’ ” (Tyler, 7) 

Tyler then switches gears again and delves into the inner thoughts of the characters, often criticisms about the other person or general thoughts on life.

“What Ira was implying was that he was shiftless. (Ira was much harder on their son than Maggie was.  He didn’t see half as many good points to him.)” (Tyler, 7)

This pattern of description, dialogue, and thoughts repeats itself throughout the first chapter and every other chapter in the entire novel. It keeps the storyline flowing from one event to the next.

Another noticeable aspect of Tyler’s writing is her tone. Despite not growing up in a small town, she writes like someone who has, and she has a reminiscence and longing for small-town life.  She seems almost reverential of Ira and Maggie’s way of life when describing the “warm, sunny day in September, with just enough breeze to cool her face,” (Tyler, 4). She seems to understand the inner workings of family life and family relationships.