The narrator of Anne Tyler’s The Beginner’s Goodbye, Aaron Woolcott, is crippled in his right arm and leg as the result of a childhood virus. He always tells everyone that he can get by just fine. Which he does. Unfortunately his real crippling lies deeper; a lifetime of fending off solicitous mothers, sisters, and sympathetic young women has left him, perhaps not surprisingly, isolated emotionally. With the sudden and unexpected death of his wife, Dr Dorothy Rosales, who is literally flattened when a huge tree comes crashing through the sunroom of the house, Aaron finds himself bereft. But of what he is bereft?
In typical Tyler fashion, this novel is filled with unusual individuals who are presented as run-of-the-mill. Dramatic action, even action as dramatic as trees crashing through houses, is muted. Interior thoughts and self-doubt predominate. And there is a gentle sprinkling of light humour and passing psychological insight.
Somewhat unusually, there is a ghost lurking in this novel. Not the much talked about visions of Dorothy that Aaron experiences periodically during the year following her death. Rather, it is the character of Dorothy herself. She is endlessly enigmatic and always just out of reach. Who is this woman? She is an Oncologist of Hispanic origin with a respected medical practice. She is curiously muffled emotionally and strangely unpractised in social interaction. Very curiously (but entirely unexplored in the novel) even after years of marriage, Aaron has never met Dorothy’s family. Aaron’s call to her brother with the news of her death is his first occasion of speaking to him. I wanted to learn a great deal more about this woman. Alas, this is Aaron’s story and he either doesn’t know anything more about his wife, or doesn’t want to know.
As ever, when you try to situate a new Anne Tyler work within the range of her (now 19) novels, you find that it fits somewhere in the middle. As do all of the others. Gently recommended (for lovers of Anne Tyler novels).