Breathing Lessons is like an episode of All in the Family, the sit-com that aired in the 1970's. The novel describes one day in the life of a middle-aged married couple, Ira and Maggie. They live in Baltimore, but have to spend the day driving to a small town in Pennsylvania to attend the funeral of a high school classmate. The deceased was married to Maggie's best friend, a woman she's known since elementary school. Ira isn't happy about going because it means he has to close his business for the day, but he recognizes Maggie needs to be there.
Ira's kind of a grump, a man of few words, while Maggie is a lovable ditz who can't stop talking. He's a pessimist, she's an optimistic. She sees the best or the potential for the best in everyone; Ira is a skeptic and a realist. They're opposites, one of those couples where you find yourself thinking "No way is that relationship going to last!" But there they are: still together 20, 30, 40 years after all the seemingly better matched couples have split up or divorced.
All in the Family had a similar couple at the heart of it: Edith, the goodhearted but a bit scatterbrained wife, and Archie, the grumpy husband. Edith liked everyone; Archie minced no words in expressing his disdain or his bigotry. A marriage of opposites, a pessimist and an optimist co-existing while viewers got to wonder what on earth Edith saw in Archie. Over the course of the show, it became clear there was more to Archie than was obvious at first, but it took awhile to get there.
At first I had a similar reaction to Ira and Maggie. The novel is told from two perspectives, first Maggie's and then Ira's, and as I was reading I kept thinking "Why on earth are these two people still married?" The perspective might be Maggie's as she's remembering how she first became friends with Serena, how she met Ira, and so on, but along the way she does enough scatterbrained stuff that you start having a Dan Savage type reaction and think Ira should just DTMFA*.
And then they have a moment at Serena's house after the church service and it hits you: it may seem like Maggie and Ira bicker about almost everything, but underneath the verbal jousting and disagreements they really care for each other. Not only do they care, despite the surface appearance of not having a clue about what the other is thinking they do actually know each other pretty well.
The second half of the novel is told in Ira's voice. The narrative continues as they're heading home, but where we spent the first half of the book seeing Maggie moving back and forth in time and memories, now it's Ira's turn. We learn about his disappointments, the family obligations that prevented him from following his dreams, and how he feels about a variety of people and events.
In contrast with the last Pulitzer winner I read, Beloved, Tyler's Breathing Lessons is grounded in reality. No magical realism here, no wondering if someone is real or imagined, an actual person or a lost spirit. The only fantasy consists of Maggie's overly optimistic dreams of her son and his ex-wife getting back together or of her being able to spend more time with her granddaughter. The novel looks at one day in the life of a pretty ordinary married couple: a small business owner and his wife. There are no dramatic epiphanies, just occasional flashes of humor and a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people coping with the fact they've hit middle age. No one's life turned out quite the way they thought it would back in high school, but that realization has a lot less sting when you look at your classmates and see that they're not what they thought they'd be either.
Overall impression of the book is it's readable. Tyler can write. I wasn't blown away by it, but I didn't suffer. I'd put over on the better side of the scale, maybe a 7 out of a theoretical 10. It's good, but it's not great. Would I recommend it to other readers? Yes, with the usual caveats. If you like Jodi Picoult you might like it, although with the qualification that it's not nearly as depressing or heartbreaking as the typical Picoult novel. Maybe it would be more accurate to lump it in with Joanna Trollope -- ordinary people, no major drama, just life with a few mildly disconcerting bumps along the way. [Usual small digression: why doesn't the local library have any of Trollope's books? She's really good, but I haven't seen anything by her since leaving Atlanta and the amazing DeKalb County library system.] [I keep thinking that all those shelves for Danielle Steele could surely be put to better use than housing that many cubic feet of what is basically the same book over and over with slightly different titles.]
In 1994 Breathing Lessons was made into a movie for television starring James Garner and Joanne Woodward. It was good enough that Woodward won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a tv drama; Garner was nominated as Best Actor. I think the casting was probably spot on, and the supporting cast looks decent, too. Garner physically fits the way Maggie describes Ira. Knowing that, will I go looking for it online somewhere? No. I already have a Watchlist on Prime that's going to take me several lifetimes to finish.
Next up on the Pulitzer list? The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos. I have heard good things about this book. I hope I'm not disappointed.
*Dump the motherfucker already.
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