In 'The Tin Can Tree,' Miss Tyler has selected material slight enough to be controlled completely, and squeezed more emotional power from it than one would have thought it contained. Miss Tyler fills her pages with other richly-idiosyncratic characters who amble about in Chekhovian fashion. . . .
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. Less perfectly realized than 'Celestial Navigation,' her extraordinarily moving and beautiful last novel, 'Searching for Caleb' is Tyler's sunniest, most expansive book. But a taste of Anne Tyler, once acquired, is a splendid addiction. 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. . . . Anne Tyler, mother of two and author of seven, resents being referred to as a housewife who writes.