Two Things Can Be True

Two things can be true. A book can be a good book, and you can not enjoy reading it at all. I think this is the best way to tell you what I think of Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons, winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was work for me to read this book. I did not enjoy it. I never had that “I just can’t put this down” experience with it. Because it won a Pulitzer, I kept wondering what was wrong with me. Did I not appreciate good writing? (Here is where I admit that I love a soft, happy, easy romance—especially when real life is taking a lot of brain space. But maybe those are rotting my brain for more intellectual works?)

Still, before our book club meeting, I knew this was a good book because I knew it would give us plenty to discuss. I had pages of questions. The conversation wandered through marriage and parenting, control and disappointment, adult children, empty nests, truth, hope, and what we owe the people we love.

Turns out I have a lot to say about this book, so maybe that makes it a good book.

The novel takes place almost entirely during one very long day in the marriage of Maggie and Ira Moran. They drive to the funeral of an old friend, detour to visit their former daughter-in-law and granddaughter, try to reunite their irresponsible son Jesse with his ex-wife Fiona, and return home having accomplished very little.

Mostly, they carry themselves and their thirty years of marriage around with them in a car that Maggie crashed just before the trip began because she is rattled by news that isn’t news at all.

Maggie drove me crazy.

Tyler clearly means her to be both maddening and endearing: a woman whose relentless interference grows out of optimism and affection. But I kept asking the same question during our discussions: Is she just so loving and so hopeful that she has tunnel vision? Or is she tragically controlling and oblivious—and oddly unempathetic for somebody who is supposed to be such an empathetic character? Is she endearing, or is she just a really bad combination of both stupid and manipulative?

Maggie believes in possibilities. She believes Jesse can become the man she hoped all along he would be. She believes Jesse and Fiona can reconcile. She believes a little rearranging of circumstances might put everyone where she wants them. The trouble is that Maggie’s hope isn’t always attached to reality, nor is she always hoping for something ultimately good for someone else. She has hope, but it veers precariously towards denial. And it is most definitely hope that isn’t rooted in reality.

I think that became the most interesting question in the book for me: What is the difference between hoping for someone and refusing to see him?

Maggie continually manipulates circumstances so that Jesse can “rise to the occasion.” Ira takes the opposite approach. He has decided that Jesse is a failure and treats him accordingly, perhaps putting in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maggie won’t accept who Jesse is; Ira won’t imagine he could become anything else.

We know that genuine love means truly focusing on another person and being able to say: I can actually see you. I can see your potential. I can love you even though you haven’t reached that potential. But I’m not going to make up my own story about who you are.

Neither parent manages that very well. Maggie’s refusal to give up on Jesse isn’t genuine love. That’s not what unconditional love is. Her refusal to give up on him and her determination to keep manipulating circumstances so that he can rise to the occasion only communicate to Jesse that his mom doesn’t believe he can manage his own life.

Ironically, that’s where Maggie agrees with Ira. Ira doesn’t believe that Jesse can manage his own life either. And he reminds him of his failure to thrive all the time. They both believe he’s a failure. They just express it differently.

Recognizing this made Breathing Lessons considerably more interesting to me. Because maybe Jesse isn’t the only person in this family nobody expects to grow. Anne Tyler has said that she considers Maggie and Ira’s marriage a good one. I struggled with that. They have certainly stayed married, and they know each other the way people do after three decades of doing life together. They accommodate one another to an extraordinary degree. Ira knows what Maggie will do before she does it. Maggie knows exactly how Ira will respond. They have developed elaborate dances around one another’s weaknesses. They have this well-established pattern of behavior, this way of maintaining a pseudo-peace, but they call it peace.

I disagree with Tyler (even though she’s clearly the expert on these characters because she created them). I don’t think that accommodation is the same thing as a healthy love. And I found myself wondering if either one of these people is helping the other become better. Or are they just doing whatever they’ve learned to do to maintain the pseudo-peace?

Frankly, that question interests me more than whether Maggie meddles too much. And it’s an important question to wrestle because there is another detail hovering over this entire ridiculously long day. This book takes place all in one day, but the next day, Maggie and Ira are taking their daughter Daisy to college.

I don’t think the looming college thing is a small detail, even though Daisy is rarely mentioned and it seems like Ira has to remind Maggie what is on the calendar. But I think it’s an important detail. This is the story of a woman the day before she has an empty nest. This is the detail that sheds a different light on Maggie’s frantic attempts to reunite Jesse and Fiona.

Who is Maggie if nobody needs her to arrange things anymore?

One woman in our group wondered whether Maggie creates chaos around herself because chaos gives her purpose. That question made us all pause to ponder. Maggie has spent decades looking outward, anticipating, arranging, smoothing, fixing. Even when nobody has asked her to. And now the children are leaving. Despite what she persists in thinking, her job right now isn’t to keep trying to fix things.

So what is her job?

Maybe that’s the question Tyler deliberately leaves unanswered. We all bemoaned the unsatisfactory ending. Maybe the next chapter of Maggie’s life begins the morning after the novel ends. And maybe there is hope for Ira and Maggie there, too.

As they start the next stage of their lives as empty nesters, could they focus on their marriage? Could they make this marriage better? Could the redemption be in the marriage arc?

I wanted that redemption before I closed the book. I wanted someone to learn something. I got to the end of the book and felt like nobody learned anything. I wanted more tenderness between Maggie and Ira, more self-awareness from Maggie, more hope from Ira, more evidence that thirty years together had done something besides teach them how to tolerate each other’s faults.

There is one small moment near the end that gave me what I was looking for. Maggie calls her newly widowed friend Serena after their disastrous encounter earlier in the day. That phone call stood out as the one place where there might have been growth. For a moment, nobody is arranging anybody else’s life. Nobody is being turned into a project. Two women see each other as they are. Life is short. Things went badly. Forgiveness is offered. They move forward.

Perhaps that is a breathing lesson.

There was no fixing, controlling, or manufacturing a better ending. There were only two women who—for a brief moment—were seeing what is actually in front of them, loving the people who are actually there, and leaving enough room for everyone to become something that couldn’t have been arranged in advance.

I still didn’t enjoy the book. But I’m not sorry I read it.

Two things can be true.

Book posts are always available to all subscribers—free and paid—because I love to support authors of fiction. These essays begin weeks before I post them. I read the book and take copious notes. Then, I met live with members of the Take Up community and we asked questions together. As happens frequently, the questions led us in a direction I may not have intended—someplace I couldn’t have reached alone. I’m happy to go down rabbit trails the Holy Spirit provides! I referred to my copious notes, the transcript, and the chat from that meeting to create this essay. You can access the full video replay of this session in the Take Up & Read membership. It is in the archives along with numerous coaching workshops, group coaching sessions, bible studies, and book chats. Come join us.