In a career that started over thirty years ago and shows no
sign of slowing down, Anne Tyler has built herself a reputation as
one of the best writers in America, winning important prizes as
well as membership in the American Academy and Institute of Art and
Letters. Is her place so near the top of the heap well-merited?
Tyler is a good writer, to be sure, on occasion a very good one. Yet
there doesn’t seem to be much recognition that the quality of her
work varies tremendously from novel to novel. The books for which
she received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer
Prize, The Accidental Tourist and Breathing Lessons respectively,
are hardly her best, while her best books often have not been
singled out for special notice. Her showier tricks have been much
touted, her truer, subtler gifts often overlooked. Tyler herself,
more astute than most of her critics, prizes Celestial Navigation
(1974) above all her other work and has confessed to a wish that the
four novels which preceded it might quietly disappear.

Tyler’s novels, in fact, can be divided into three categories:
the downright bad—a category that includes
If Morning Ever Comes (1964), The Tin Can
Tree (1965), Searching for Caleb (1975), and Morgan’s
Passing (1980); the worthwhile but extremely flawed—A
Slipping-Down Life (1969), The Clock Winder (1972), Earthly
Possessions (1977), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and
Breathing Lessons (1988); and the good: Celestial
Navigation (1974), Dinner at