What Book to Read?

Anne Tyler is a much loved writer – this is her seventeenth book. She uses the small events of life to talk about some of its big issues. Her novels are gentle, funny and sad, and describe American middle class daily life with such fond precision that readers can recognise the veracity of the description, even if they live in a different sort of reality themselves. Digging to America (2006) is no exception.

Two families encounter each other at Baltimore airport, where they are both meeting for the first time the baby girls they have adopted from Korea. The families are very different. Bitsy and Brad Dickinson-Donaldson are perhaps a bit hippy– Bitsy wears garments made from fabric she has woven , and prefers organic food and cloth nappies – but are solidly American. ‘”Donaldson” seemed so ultra-American, or was that because she was reminded of McDonald’s hamburgers?’ Ziba and Sami Yazdan are from an Iranian background, and though both were born in America, seem slightly exotic. Bitsy enthusiastically organises for the two families to meet, so that the children can spend time together. A friendship quickly develops between the parents, and other family members such as Sami’s mother Maryam are drawn into the circle. Much of the story is told around set pieces like the Arrival Party held every year on the date the girls arrived in America; the plot is driven more by the interactions of the characters than by any particularly dramatic events.

The big questions that this book quietly asks are about belonging. The wisdom of Americans adopting Asian children is one of these questions. There are some misgivings before the girls arrive – is adoption just ‘do gooding’? Are they just going to ‘swoop up some lucky baby and give it a perfect life’? I think Tyler plays this issue down; once the babies have arrived, they are instantly beloved by all. They are too young even by the end of the book to have clear views on adoption though both are shown as fully American children, without much interest in their Korean heritage. However they do provide the title; having tried to dig to China in the back yard, they wonder if Chinese children try and dig to America. Clearly you might have to do some digging to get to the bottom of what ‘America’ is.

Belonging takes in much more than adoption. At some point in the story, most of the main characters wonder if they belong. Maryam, who I find the most sympathetic of the characters, has never managed to feel she quite fits into America, where ‘everybody else knew the rules without asking’. She doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as Iranian; though she is skilled at cooking Iranian food, she resents being expected to prepare ‘ethnic demonstrations.’ She has no desire to go back and visit Iran, yet is annoyed if American Iranians act like other Americans. But how much of her attitude is because she is ‘foreign’ and how much because she is a reserved sort of person? Bitsy loves Ziba and Sami; she feels that adoption has forged a bond that she can’t share with other mothers who have given birth – and in that sense, that she doesn’t ‘belong’. But she still sees the Yazdans as ‘foreign’; of Sami she thinks that ‘even though his accent was dyed-in-the-wool Baltimore, something studiously, effortlessly casual in his manner marked him as non-American.’ Ziba hates it when her mother speaks in Farsi rather than English, but isn’t above playing the exotic card herself. Is this really ‘foreignness’, or just friendly competition? ‘It’s harder than you realize, being American,’ says Bitsy’s father, Dave. This is said without irony – but is nevertheless ironic; they are all Americans. But it’s also Dave who points out that ‘We all think the others belong more.’

The story is told from the perspective of several of the characters, but is always framed in Tyler’s faintly ironic and whimsical tone. If they sometimes look a bit foolish, it is done in the kindest way. The worst we see is muddled thinking and mild self-delusion – there is no evil in this world, though the realities of repression in Iran and the harassment of middle eastern looking Americans after 9/11 are sitting on the edges of the story. Sami Yazdan sells real estate; I kept wondering if the family will be wiped out in the Global Financial Crisis. But not in an Anne Tyler book.

There isn’t much about Anne Tyler on the internet, but you can read her first interview for forty years – which appeared in The Guardian in 2012 – here. I’ve written about her eighteenth book, Noah’s Compass (2009), here.