At her best – as in her ninth novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) her 10th, The Accidental Tourist (1985) her 11th, Breathing Lessons (1988) and the recent masterwork The Beginner's Goodbye (2012), her 19th novel – Tyler renders the stuff of the ordinary into an art so subtle as to affect the way a reader will henceforth consider life. It has taken time – Tyler's first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published more than 50 years ago – but if ever a writer has perfected her craft, it is Tyler. Her work is not read but inhabited, and by her readers as well as her characters. There is no limit to the superlatives that Tyler inspires. Or, put more accurately, Tyler, with a foot in the north and a foot in the south through her Virginian childhood, has come to dominate the theme of family, most specifically the American family. Family has dominated the work of Anne Tyler.
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