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.
