Five Novel Last Lines From Anne Tyler To Put You In a Whimsical Mood
One definition of whimsical is “full of, actuated by, or exhibiting whims — especially: lightly fanciful.” If you wanted to find a writer who would fit this definition well, then look no further than Anne Tyler. If you are looking for a novel that will put you in a magical, whimsical, and enchanted mood, then opening any one of Anne Tyler’s dozens of novels will bring you full satisfaction. But you don’t have to take it from me. Instead, let’s briefly explore five of her novels by one of the most amazing places to start — the ending. I hope it is not too much of a spoiler alert to give the last lines away, all hopes that it will actually move you to start at the novel’s other end yourself!
“Of course. We go around and around in this world, and here we go again.”
—Anne Tyler’s The Beginner’s Guide to Goodbye.
This novel features Aaron, an eccentric book publisher whose wife dies in a horrendous accident. While Aaron grieves and struggles to pick up the pieces of his life, he begins to have visions of his deceased wife Dorothy visiting him from beyond. This shorter novel of Tyler’s is a humorous, magical tale on one side but also a literary examination of grieving on the other. While Aaron ties up loose ends with his familiar visitor, he finds his heart beginning to mend and learns how to truly say goodbye to the love of his life. For readers who have not yet encountered Anne Tyler’s works, this novel may serve as a good starting point as it features her doing what she does best — tackling what is spiritual, immeasurable, and wondrous in a light, tenderhearted way.
Also to note the novel’s last lines — these are what Aaron suspected others might have thought if they had witnessed Dorothy’s appearances. Aren’t these lines just magical and almost mystical in their own right? Certainly, all readers will recount similar experiences to finding lost loved ones continuing to be with them in their everyday lives. While it may not often be full-blown apparitions, it certainly is little things like the recounted cherished memories.
“He could almost convince himself that he’d never been wounded at all”
— Anne Tyler’s Noah’s Compass.
The last line of this novel sheds light on an unthinkable event that happens to protagonist Liam Pennywell at the beginning of the novel. This unthinkable event of Liam actually being attacked in his own home leaves him waking up in a hospital bed wondering how he got moved from his snug apartment bedroom. As Liam struggles to recover from the ordeal and reclaim the few moments from being attacked he just cannot remember, readers follow Liam on a journey of self-discovery. On the way, they also come to empathize with him as he struggles to keep up with his three daughters, former wife, and other family and friends who keep disrupting his desire to lead a solitary life.
His cold exterior is melted by the unconventional Eunice, a sort of “rememberer” by profession whom Liam hopes will help him remember the attack. Instead of helping him reclaim a few lost moments of his life, Eunice opens the doors to romance and love that Liam thought had closed on him long ago. But as Liam falls in love, another dramatic twist reminds readers life is not all happy and fun. Eunice, the “rememberer” by trade, has forgotten to share a minor detail about her life with Liam. The shock pushes Liam further down a path of confusion for which he must now do serious soul-searching along with his search for long-lost memories. This novel is also Anne Tyler at her best, and an amazing starting point for those who have never read her works. Here, one of the main lessons she offers readers is that even those individuals who seem to drift through life, never learn to get on with others, or just seem quite bland in general can have hearts of gold and experiences with infinite richness.
“On the screen, Rebecca’s face appeared, merry and open and sunlit, and she saw that she really had been having a wonderful time.”
—Anne Tyler’s Back When We Were Grownups.
This is another classical novel where Anne Tyler is at her best, featuring the amazing and wonderful tale of Rebecca Davitch. A 53-year-old widow with three grown children(two of which are stepchildren), Rebecca makes a living managing her married family’s generations-old household reception and party management business. Her life could not be busier with a full-time business, a large family with children and numerous grandchildren, a centenarian housemate/uncle, and the looming memory of her larger-than-life deceased husband Joe. But at a large family picnic in the novel’s beginning, Rebecca has a stunning realization that the life she has lived may not have been the life of her real self.
Readers are given an intimate, honest account of Rebecca’s middling-life crisis and her journey to reclaim her lost younger self. This takes her back to her old college boyfriend Will, the young stodgy man she left for the more exciting Joe with whom she now has a second chance. But as she works to reignite the flame with long-lost Will and also endure with her large Davitch kin some of the greatest family challenges yet faced, Rebecca wonders more and more if her alternate life would have been all she has imagined. The result of her journey of self-discovery is shocking, bittersweet, and ultimately fulfilling. Once again, Tyler is at her best tackling ever-mysterious philosophical and spiritual themes. For these times where countless individuals have struggled to lead authentic lives, Tyler’s last line — and ultimately the whole novel before — offers profound insights. Sometimes our truest life is the one we have been living all along and it isn’t so much about struggling to “live a life you love,” (to borrow the famous lines) rather than “loving the life you live.”
“‘Is it you?’ she would ask. ‘It’s you! It’s really and truly you!’ she would cry, and her face would light up with joy. He began to walk faster, hurrying toward the bend.”
— Anne Tyler’s The Amateur Marriage
This novel of Tyler’s is one with more bitter or dismal components than most others. Starting in 1941, with the whole globe swept up in the early years of World War II, Michael and Pauline promise to share their lives together before Michael goes off to war. But Michael soon returns after an injury at training, and the couple barely makes it down the aisle in 1943 because of drawn-out pre-marital bickering. The novel then follows the couple through a strenuous decades-long marriage of raising children, tackling homes, jobs, and full lives, all the while never really ending their ongoing marital fight. They manage to raise their children and even parent grandson Pagan after their daughter Lindy disappears. But on the night of their thirtieth wedding anniversary, a final argument ensues to mark the end of their “amateur marriage” they both never seemed to get quite settled down in.
While it may seem this novel is mainly bitter and tragic, Anne Tyler is at her best to lighten the pages with her usual magical strokes. Each chapter eloquently captures the times, people, places, and even objects of the decade Michael, Pauline, and their family are currently dwelling in — almost as though readers could just step right in and walk around that past time. Also, Tyler makes sure to equally divide the chapters between Michael’s and Pauline’s point-of-view — so vividly capturing their thoughts, intimations, emotions, and deeper lifes’ movements as they go through each passing season and deal with the discombobulation of their marriage. As always, Tyler vividly captures the movements of the characters’ deeper lives, spiritual growth, and ultimate humanity. The final lines are actually of the elderly Michael taking a walk in the neighborhood where he and Pauline first lived over half a century earlier. Long after Michael has long since remarried and Pauline has even passed away, he comes to see his old life partner still alive in his mind’s eye and makes peace with their time together in a way he could not before. How wistful readers might feel as they might relate to Michael, as each of us at some point revisits the past through the eyes of memory and perhaps understands it for the first time.
“Focus purely on the scenery, which had changed to open countryside now, leaving behind the blighted row houses, leaving behind the station under its weight of roiling dark clouds, and the empty city streets around it, and the narrower streets farther north with the trees turning inside out in the wind, and the house on Bouton Road where the filmy-skirted ghosts frolicked and danced on the porch with nobody left to watch.”
— Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread
One of Tyler’s latest novels, this masterpiece is much like its last line — overarching in scope and unboundedly rich in depth. The novel follows the Whitshank family over generations. Red Whitshank’s parents entered into a dangerous love in the 1920s while his wife Abby fell in love with him in the late ’50s. As they raised their children in the ’60s through ’80s, they especially had trouble with son Denny, who continued to cause them to split hairs into his 20s and 30s. The family’s fast-winding progression of years makes a brief stop in 2012 when Red and Abby’s four children must come together as many adult kids must to care for their ailing parents and face an unexpected tragedy.
As this is one of Tyler’s greatest endeavors as a novelist, readers may find themselves visiting and revisiting the novel’s chapters and parts and once again never failing to exhaust all of its riches. Like any epic chronological novel, Tyler brilliantly juxtaposes each generation together into one volume where each age can simultaneously fill their respective chapters fully like each of us real individuals strives to fully live in our allotted blocks of time. More significantly, Tyler once again masters the art of capturing the hidden ripples streaming from the smallest parts of each character’s days. How was it that Abby fell in love with Red as she watched him examine a tree in 1959? What are some of the endless secrets of the house all the Whitshanks lived in for decades, built by Red’s father and finally left behind at the novel’s end? And once again, doesn’t the novel’s last line with Denny looking out of a train leaving Baltimore stir the hearts of readers as they ponder how much of Denny’s story is really tied up in his family’s story. And as each reader reflects on their own personal story stemming back so much to their own family’s story, they realize a little more how each family’s story is really melding back to humanity’s story.
So after we have briefly explored five of Anne Tyler’s masterpieces, starting with their magical last lines, I hope you are inspired to go out and find a copy of one of her numerous novels. Tyler is certainly the type of novelist who so meticulously and intricately captures the movements of characters’ deeper lives, much like some of the greatest writers throughout history. And like countless masterpieces from throughout the ages, Tyler’s works can also help satisfy readers’ spiritual and existential yearnings. In each novel, she never ceases to tackle many of those greatest perennial and ever-mysterious questions. Certainly, Tyler does this so well that even her novel’s last lines (as shown above) offer numerous insights. You can ponder those last lines more to mine new riches, or you can venture to pick up one of her novels to find countless more lines equally eloquent, masterful, and captivating.
