This is an exceedingly good novel, so mature, so gently wise and so brightly amusing that, if it weren't printed right there on the jacket, few readers would suspect that Mrs. Tyler was only 22.
Gentle charm is the author's stock in trade.
Anne Tyler is especially gifted in the art of freeing her characters and then keeping track of them as they move in their unique and often solitary orbits. Her fiction is filled with displaced persons who persist stubbornly in their own destinies. But a taste of Anne Tyler, once acquired, is a splendid addiction. She is a wonderful writer. Anne Tyler, who is blessedly prolific and graced with an effortless-seeming talent at describing whole rafts of intricately individualized people, might be described as a domestic novelist, one of that great line descending from Jane Austin. . . .