Search - Breathing Lessons

A husband and wife discover how extraordinary their ordinary lives are.

One of Anne Tyler's best books. She gets the domestic relationship between this husband and wife just right. Lovely book.

One of Anne Tyler's best

Anne Tyler = great book!

A wonderful novel, glowing with the insight and compassion of an artist's touch.

Very entertaining!

Discovering the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Pulitzer prize winning author Anne Tyler's story of a couple who get reacquainted with one another during a long automobile trip to a friend's funeral. The reviewers loved this one, with good reason.

Not my kind of book. seemed very sad, dragged along.

Did not care for this book - very disappointing!

I loved this book. Anne Tyler's quirky sense of humor and all of her neurotic characters are very entertaining. Very sweet (and sometimes complicated) look at marriage & what we all put up with when we love someone.

Amazon.com: "Maggie Moran's mission is to connect and unite people, whether they want to be united or not. Maggie is a meddler and as she and her husband, Ira, drive 90 miles to the funeral of an old friend, Ira contemplates his wasted life and the traffic, while Maggie hatches a plant to reunite her son Jesse with his long-estranged wife and baby. As Ira explains, "She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her view of them." Though everyone criticizes her for being "ordinary," Maggie's ability to see the beauty and potential in others ultimately proves that she is the only one fighting the resignation they all fear. The book captured the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1989."

From Publishers Weekly: "In perhaps her most mainstream, accessible novel so far, Tyler spins a tale of marriage and middle-class lives, in an age when social standards and life expectations have gone askew. While she remains a brilliant observer of human nature, there is a subtle change here in Tyler's focus. Where before her protagonists were eccentric, sometimes slightly fantastical characters who came at the end to a sense of peace, if not happiness, Maggie Moran and her husband Ira are average, unexceptional, even somewhat drab; and outside of some small epiphanies, little is changed between them at the story's close. It's this very realism that makes the story so effective and moving. Taking place on one summer day, when Maggie and Ira drive from Baltimore to Pennsylvania to a funeral, with an accidental detour involving an old black man they pass on the road and a side trip to see their former daughter-in-law and their seven-year-old grandchild, the novel reveals the basic incompatibility of their 28-year marriage and the love that binds them together nonetheless. This is another typical Tyler union of opposites: Maggie is impetuous, scatterbrained, klutzy, accident prone and garrulous; Ira is self-contained, precise, dignified, aloof with, however, an irritating (or endearing ) habit of whistling tunes that betray his inner thoughts. Both feel that their children are strangers, that the generations are "sliding downhill," and that somehow they have gone wrong in a society whose values they no longer recognize. With irresistibly funny passages you want to read out loud and poignant insights that illuminate the serious business of sharing lives in an unsettling world, this is Tyler's best novel yet." Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --

Breathing Lessons was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

Breathing Lessons is the wonderfully moving and surprising story of Ira and Maggie Moran. She's impetuous, harum-scarum, easy-going; he's competent, patient, seemingly infallible. They've been married for 28 years. Now, as they drive from their home in Baltimore to the funeral of Maggie's best friend's husband, Anne Tyler shows us all there is to know about a marriage - the expectations, the disappointments, the way children can create storms in a family, the way a wife and husband can fall in love all over again, the way nothing really changes.

From Publishers Weekly
In perhaps her most mainstream, accessible novel so far, Tyler spins a tale of marriage and middle-class lives, in an age when social standards and life expectations have gone askew. While she remains a brilliant observer of human nature, there is a subtle change here in Tyler's focus. Where before her protagonists were eccentric, sometimes slightly fantastical characters who came at the end to a sense of peace, if not happiness, Maggie Moran and her husband Ira are average, unexceptional, even somewhat drab; and outside of some small epiphanies, little is changed between them at the story's close. It's this very realism that makes the story so effective and moving. Taking place on one summer day, when Maggie and Ira drive from Baltimore to Pennsylvania to a funeral, with an accidental detour involving an old black man they pass on the road and a side trip to see their former daughter-in-law and their seven-year-old grandchild, the novel reveals the basic incompatibility of their 28-year marriage and the love that binds them together nonetheless. This is another typical Tyler union of opposites: Maggie is impetuous, scatterbrained, klutzy, accident prone and garrulous; Ira is self-contained, precise, dignified, aloof with, however, an irritating (or endearing ) habit of whistling tunes that betray his inner thoughts. Both feel that their children are strangers, that the generations are "sliding downhill," and that somehow they have gone wrong in a society whose values they no longer recognize. With irresistibly funny passages you want to read out loud and poignant insights that illuminate the serious business of sharing lives in an unsettling world, this is Tyler's best novel yet.

***

no review comments..

This is my favorite Tyler book.

Everyone knows a couple like the Morans. Maggie with her scatterbrained ways and her just slightly irritating--but goodhearted--attempts to make enerything right for everyone...And Ira, infinitely patient, who's addicted to solitaire and who whistles out popular tunes, the only barometer of his moods. They've learned all there is to know about each other--two ordinary lives in a comfortably routine marriage.
But on the road to a friend's funeral, they make some unexpected detours--and discover how extraordinary their ordinary lives really are...

Anne Tyler also wrote The Accidental Tourist. This is another very enjoyable read.

Excellent book by Tyler.