 First edition | |
| Author | Anne Tyler |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Knopf |
Publication date | 1991 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 337 pp |
| ISBN | 0-679-40361-2 |
| OCLC | 23691414 |
| 813/.54 20 | |
| LC Class | PS3570.Y45 S25 1991 |
Saint Maybe is a 1991 novel by American author Anne Tyler. [1]
Tyler's plot explores the ways ordinary people react to disastrous events with quietly heroic behavior. In 1965, Baltimore, the Bedloes are your typical All-American family, consisting of parents Bee and Doug, and their three children, Claudia, who is married, Danny, who works in the post office, and Ian, who's 17, and in high school. Danny meets and marries Lucy Dean, a young divorcee with two children, 6-year old Agatha, and 3-year old Thomas, and the two have a daughter together, Daphne, shortly after the holidays. However, Ian, who is frequently called to babysit for the children, grows suspicious of Lucy's frequent outings, and suspects Daphne, who was born only seven months after Danny and Lucy met, was conceived beforehand. One night, after Ian misses out on a date with his girlfriend, Cicily because he was babysitting the children for longer than expected, he tells Danny he suspects Lucy is having an affair, and that Daphne isn't his baby, and Danny commits suicide via car crash.
In the aftermath of Danny's death, Lucy becomes increasingly depressed, and dies of an overdose of sleeping pills soon afterwards. As no one can trace any of Lucy's relatives, or the older two children's father, responsibility of the three children falls to Bee and Doug, both of whom have health problems of their own. Ian, now in college, learns his suspicious were unfounded, and must deal with the guilt of the tragedy he unwittingly caused. He happens upon the storefront "Church of the Second Chance", and receives spiritual guidance from its founder Reverend Emmett, to take action to prove his repentance and earn his forgiveness from God. He decides to drop out of college to become a carpenter and help his ailing parents raise the children, until he eventually becomes their primary caretaker, sacrificing his own freedom to fulfill what he perceives to be a lifelong moral obligation.
As the years pass and the three children mature, Ian continues to be torn between his sense of obligation to the children and the urge to have a "real life", but he increasingly finds solace and peace in participation at the Church of the Second Chance and becomes devoted to it, its homespun followers, and Rev. Emmett. Ian also develops into a dependable and loving father. The kids eventually grow up, and Agatha and Thomas leave home to launch their own careers, while Daphne stays home with Ian and the grandparents. Bee later dies of a heart attack, and Agatha returns home, to find a disorganized house and tries to restore order. Efforts to organize the house with help from Daphne's friend, a young female professional "Clutter Counselor" Rita DiCarlo, ultimately provide Ian with an opportunity for a new beginning. The story ends in 1990 with Ian and Rita, now married, and raising a son of their own, with help from Daphne. "Moving back and forth among the points of view of various characters, Ms. Tyler traces over two decades in the lives of the Bedloes, showing us the large and small events that shape family members' lives and the almost imperceptible ways in which feelings of familial love and obligation mutate over the years." [2]
Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times writes, "Fans of Ms. Tyler's work...will soon recognize the conflict [Ian] feels between self-sacrifice and independence as a manifestation of one of her favorite themes, namely the tension in American life between community and freedom, familial responsibility and autonomous self-definition. Indeed, this is a dialectic that every member of the Bedloe family must come to terms with by the end of the novel....Each character in "Saint Maybe" has been fully rendered, fleshed out with a palpable interior life, and each has been fit, like a hand-sawed jigsaw-puzzle piece, into the matrix of family life. The result is a warm and generous novel, a novel that attests once again to Ms. Tyler's enormous gifts as a writer and her innate understanding of the mysteries of kinship and blood." [2]
Poet and novelist Jay Parini writes, "I adored Saint Maybe. In many ways it is Anne Tyler's most sophisticated work, a realistic chronicle that celebrates family life without erasing the pain and boredom that families almost necessarily inflict upon their members. Ian Bedloe, for his part, sits near the top of Ms. Tyler's fine list of heroes. Exactly how she makes us care so much about him remains a mystery to me. That is, perhaps, the mystery of art." [3]
In her review in the Christian Science Monitor , Marilyn Gardner summarizes, "In Saint Maybe, as in her other novels, Tyler dramatizes a debate about the pros and cons of family life. Is the family an anchor in the storm? Or is it a shackle? Do duty and devotion hold together the members who make up a family as well as the family itself? Or do families become, not support systems, but burdens of guilt, leading to damaging sacrifices of personal freedom?...As she explores the myriad ways in which dreams get deferred and hopes revised, infusing the prosaic details of domestic life with honor, humor, and deep affection, it is Anne Tyler's achievement to raise ordinariness to an art form." [4]
In 1998, the novel was adapted for a Hallmark Hall of Fame television film, starring Thomas McCarthy, Mary-Louise Parker, Blythe Danner, Edward Herrmann, Melina Kanakaredes, Glynnis O'Connor, Bethel Leslie, Denis O'Hare, and Jeffrey Nordling.
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Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail", her "rigorous and artful style", and her "astute and open language."
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