United, the dysfunctional family stands

Even dysfunctional families function -- however problematically. Anne Tyler reminds us of this intriguing quirk every couple of years with her wise, often funny novels about nonstandard Baltimore families who struggle with the conflicting pulls of domesticity and freedom. In her 1989 Pulitzer Prize winner, “Breathing Lessons,” Tyler zeroed in hilariously on a single day in the life of a couple who love each other through 28 years of basic incompatibility. Her 16th novel, “The Amateur Marriage,” is a more sober portrait of a union of opposites. It spans 60 years and shows how a bad marriage plays out over successive generations. Her characters, although less eccentric and endearing than many she’s created, still come off the page without a jarring note.

Like her last novel, “Back When We Were Grownups,” Tyler’s new book concerns characters whose lives turn out differently than expected, characters who even wonder whether they’re leading the wrong life. Tyler’s people tend to obsess over the road not taken and where it might have led them. But as the dotty Poppy concludes in the far more antic and entertaining “Grownups,” “Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be.”

“The Amateur Marriage” opens in a Polish Catholic neighborhood of Baltimore shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It’s the year of Tyler’s birth, 1941. Among those caught up in the patriotic fervor of the moment are Michael Anton, a prudent, dutiful clerk in the grocery store of his dour, widowed mother, and red-coated, impulsive Pauline Barclay, from the tonier side of town. They mistake the excitement in the air for love and marry when Michael is discharged from the Army after being wounded by a bullet during training. It’s a hasty step they’ll come to repent at leisure.

Tyler checks in on the Anton marriage every few years; it’s as if giving them her uninterrupted attention would be unbearable even for her. The periodic checkups, however, provide an overview not just of familial fluctuations but also those of fashion, decor and the rise of suburbia. As always, she nails the details, from canned soup suppers giving way to “gourmet” concoctions featuring mushrooms and artichokes to the Antons’ modern “white ‘crackle ice’ vinyl headboard.”

Her scenes from a marriage are not quite as grim as Ingmar Bergman’s film of that title, but they have a plodding weight that threatens to submerge the center sections of the novel. Pauline has a habit of blurting out the unspeakable, not realizing that words have an afterlife: “Go away! Just go! Just take your stuffy pompous boring self-righteous self away and leave us in peace!” she shouts during a typical fight. Michael reflects, “Pauline must think words were like dust, or scuff marks, or spilled milk, easily wiped away and leaving no trace.” But he’s no slouch in the verbal assault department either: “I’m sick to death of you and your nasty disposition. I never should have married you,” he flings back.

It is not uncommon for a Tyler character to take drastic action to change his or her life -- flight. In “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant,” her clear-eyed American family saga that scooped Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” by more than 15 years, Beck Tull deserts his wife and three children. It is still one of her best books. In “Ladder of Years,” Tyler’s 40-year-old heroine walks away from her husband and three children while on vacation.

The Antons stick out their union until their 30th anniversary, when Michael throws in the towel (although he continues to shovel Pauline’s driveway for decades). But he’s preceded in his desertion by their oldest daughter, Lindy, who runs away at 17 in the early 1960s. She resurfaces five years later in a drug rehab retreat in San Francisco, just long enough to shunt her 3-year-old son, Pagan, into her parents’ joint custody before disappearing again.

“The Amateur Marriage” suffers from a shortage of Tyler’s by now almost trademark peculiarity and specificity. Michael and Pauline’s clash of dispositions is not all that distinct from much of what filters through the nation’s divorce courts. What saves the book from the deadbeat doldrums are its chapters on life after marriage, when rancor finally fades, tellingly titled “The World Won’t End” and “A Cooler Spot on the Pillow.” More important is her beautifully understated verbal precision. This is how she describes Pauline’s dizzying realization that Michael has left her for good: “She had that slippery, off-balance feeling, the feeling a person might get if she were sitting on a stopped train and the train next to her started gliding away and she wasn’t sure, for a second, whether it was her train or the other one that was moving.”

Tyler’s domain remains the sweep and arc and dips and rises of families. With perhaps a heavier heart and hand than usual but with flashes of her customary graceful authority and psychological insight, she shows how the ties that bind continue to hold, sometimes chokingly but often reassuringly, even through separations, divorce and death.