Searching for Caleb

Knopf, $8.95

To read Anne Tyler is to be drawn into a world so removed, so full, and so subtle that one feels clumsy trying to describe it. Why, aren’t these freaks and misfits? Happy (rarely lucky) grotesques? Okie-bohemians, drop-out aristocrats turned minstrel or fix-it man? People who seesaw from blind action to stark awareness of the tangled knitone/ purl-two/drop-stitch of their lives’ fabric? Impossible to show in a few words that these characters are not simply bewitched runners-up in life, which is how they seem to people around them. But Anne Tyler knows how to draw their richness and wholeness, and that is what makes her novels magical. She shows what her characters grew from and into, luring the reader beyond the obvious pathos of their situations to their gaiety, antic fancy, and penchant for surprise. The reader is bewitched— not unlike a Tyler character.

So much so that the temptation is to lay it all out, which is futile: trying to sum up an Anne Tyler story is like attempting to “explain" sorcery. Great Uncle Caleb is a Peck, “the one that got away" from a genteel Baltimore family that is knotted in upon itself just short of incest. Caleb’s great-niece and great-nephew. Justine and Duncan, are first cousins. Married at twenty, they loop through odd jobs as storekeeper and fortune-teller in a perimeter of towns in Maryland and Virginia, circling Baltimore, circling other Pecks. They take in their shared - grandfather Daniel, retired judge, refined, true Peck. Why does he commence a search for his brother Caleb, almost sixty years after Caleb checked out of the family and its business (to play ragtime and blues in the streets of New Orleans, it emerges); why—?

—Well, it can’t be summed up; I’ve only just begun.

“If you put it in a novel no one would believe it,”we say of experiences we don’t know how to put in novels. Anne Tyler can do it and make it seem the most natural thing in the world.