“Maggie and Ira Moran had to go to a funeral in Deer Lick, Pennsylvania.”
Taking place over a single day in the life of Maggie and her husband Ira Moran, Anne Tyler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Breathing Lessons is a bittersweet, charming, at times hilarious, character study of a middle-aged couple, warts and all. The particular marriage under a microscope is the long-standing union of forty-eight-year-old quirky, klutzy, Maggie and fifty-year-old cynical, methodical, misanthropic Ira (a “closed-in, isolated man”). Of the two, Maggie is the main character in the novel, a flighty and unpredictable woman, or as one character calls her, “not a straight-line kind of person” (162). The story centers on their road trip from their home in Baltimore, Maryland to the tiny rural community of Deer Lick, Pennsylvania where they plan to attend the funeral of Max Gill, the late husband of Maggie’s childhood best friend Serena. Along the way they reflect on their lives, their marriage, and their two children, both of whom were “accidents” (the elder child is a ne’er-do-well failed rockstar named Jesse and the younger is an enterprising daughter bound for college named Daisy). Throughout the novel, Maggie and Ira bicker incessantly and Maggie’s wacky hijinks lead the couple to encounter all sorts of misadventures and mishaps.
The Morans’ rollicking odyssey begins at the end of a warm, dry summer as Maggie collects the family car, a Dodge, from a nearby autobody shop, but moments later she thinks she hears a familiar voice on the radio and accidentally punches the gas, rather than the brake, and crashes straight into a Pepsi truck. But instead of sticking around to assess the damage, she simply drives off in her car with a busted fender. We later learn that the voice on the radio sounded like the voice of a young woman named Fiona, the Morans’ ex-daughter-in-law and mother of their only grandchild, a daughter named Leroy. Throughout the novel, we learn more about their son, Jesse, a high school dropout who played guitar in a hard rock band while struggling to maintain a job. While a teenager, a parade of young women came and went for Jesse until he met Fiona who quickly became pregnant with Jesse’s child. Fiona’s family desperately tried to convince her to terminate the pregnancy, but Jesse had other plans. He made grand promises about being a good father to his son and building a crib for him, but it was actually Maggie (Jesse’s mother) who made the final plea to Fiona and persuaded her to keep the baby (despite Maggie’s own personal misgivings). Fiona then moved in with Jesse at his parents’ house and they got married in a humble ceremony, but they quickly descended into a pattern of bitter feuds and Jesse unsurprisingly turned out to be a deadbeat father. This was despite the fact that Maggie and Fiona grew quite close, at one point Maggie took Fiona to her birthing classes where Fiona learned about “breathing lessons” (hence the title of the book).
“‘You need the air,’ she [Maggie] said. ‘Take deep, deep breaths’” (240).
And later Jesse said to Fiona while she was in labor: “Hon, I don’t think you’re breathing right” to which she responded, “Lay off about my breathing! I’ll breathe any way I choose” (248).
Throughout the novel, characters are subtly portrayed as breathing in different ways, or at least becoming aware of their own breathing. “‘Breathing lessons –really,’ she [Fiona] said, dropping to the floor with a thud. ‘Don’t they reckon I must know how to breathe by now?’” (179-180). People like Fiona are asked to consider their unconscious act of breathing, and in so doing, Anne Tyler reminds readers that, like the characters in Breathing Lessons, we are also still living, breathing, sometimes oblivious to the dance of life, often in need of slowing down. There is a certain degree of beauty in this simple, ordinary act of breathing –something we take for granted. It is the music of living. For example, before singing “Love Is A Many Splendored Thing” at Max’s funeral, the same song she and Ira once sang at Serena and Max’s wedding many years earlier: “Maggie felt that breathless flutter high in her chest that foretold stage fright. She had taken a deep, trembly breath, and then Ira had unobtrusively set a hand at the small of her back. That had steadied her” (71).
One of the more interesting background characters in Breathing Lessons is the Morans’ daughter, Daisy, whom they are set to drop off at college the following day after the funeral. Who is Daisy? We never really see her, or at least she is not given as much air time as their son Jesse. But Daisy is somehow important and distinct from her family –she is orderly, academic, and slightly anxious. She could not be more different from her black sheep brother, and she serves as a thorn in the side of her mother: “‘Mom? Was there a certain conscious point in your life when you decided to settle for being ordinary?’” (30). In many ways, Daisy might just be the most competent character in the novel.
At any rate, after arriving at Max’s funeral, Maggie and Ira squabble over various silly things (their personalities are contrasted with vague nods to classic novels like Pride and Prejudice and also madcap screwball comedy films like It Happened One Night). Both Maggie and Ira notably blame each other for the collapse of their son’s marriage years ago. It all happened after a big fight on Ira’s birthday at the horse races, in which Fiona, who was already angry with Maggie, abruptly left after Ira revealed that his son Jesse is not a good person –avoiding getting a job, and instead drinking and dating other women behind his wife’s back even as she struggles to care for the baby. As Ira reveals these details, Anne Tyler writes: “Somebody sucked in a breath. They all looked elsewhere” (269) –another example of people’s “breathing” playing an important thematic role in the novel. We also learn that part of the reason Jesse was absent for much of his child’s life, was that he was secretly hoping for a son, not a daughter. After this big public blow-up, Fiona is irate. She abruptly leaves the house and never comes back. These flashbacks illuminate the looming weight of the Morans’ losing their son’s family, particularly for Maggie who wishes she had a relationship with her granddaughter. She recalls a few embarrassing times in which she secretly snuck over to Fiona’s house to get a glimpse of her granddaughter, but none of them went particularly well.
After Max’s funeral, the procession heads to Serena’s house where a film projector is dusted off, showing surviving footage of Serena and Max’s wedding. Cue more flashbacks of young Maggie and Ira falling in love even though Maggie was also long-distance dating a young man who was busy getting radicalized in college. Maggie and Ira bonded together for their joint performance of “Love Is A Many Splendored Thing” at Serena and Max’s wedding, and eventually got together against Ira’s father’s wishes. The narrative in the novel briefly pivots to Ira’s perspective where we learn about his father owning a frame store (which Ira has since inherited), his somewhat dependent sisters, his mother who died young, and his overall fatalistic outlook on life.
But after watching the old footage after the funeral, Maggie starts feeling sentimental and wanders into Serena’s bedroom where she finds Ira playing cards by himself (his chosen activity for escaping from reality) and she quietly seduces him but before they get too far, a shocked Serena bursts into the room to find them kissing in a chair. Outraged, she kicks Maggie and Ira out of the house in front of all their friends. Despite this mild embarrassment, it almost seems as if this is a typical for a day in the life of Maggie Moran.
Maggie and Ira then get back out on the road and head home toward Baltimore but, at Maggie’s insistence, they spontaneously decide to pay an unscheduled visit to their ex-daughter-in-law Fiona and granddaughter Leroy in the little town of Cartwheel, Pennsylvania (their first such visit in years). “All I want to do is drop in on them this after and make my offer, which might just incidentally cause Fiona to reconsider a bit about Jesse” (133). Predictably, the visit is a little awkward since now-seven-year-old Leroy hardly recognizes her grandparents. And when confronted by Maggie, Fiona says she never called into the radio show that morning and has no plans of remarrying (she is single). Somehow, in the course of the conversation, Maggie manages to convince Fiona to return to Baltimore with them for a brief visit, hoping Fiona and Jesse will somehow rekindle their relationship. But unsurprisingly, the haphazardly thrown together dinner goes haywire when Jesse arrives and it becomes clear he is not still in love with Fiona. Ultimately, once again Ira spoils the moment by reminding everyone that Jesse is unreliable and currently sleeping with other women. In a huff, Fiona leaves with Leroy, cursing herself for ever believing she could have ever returned to this ridiculous family.
**************
Breathing Lessons is a novel that invites us to consider the complex idea of marriage by contrasting different couples: Maggie and Ira’s twenty-eight-year marriage, the marriage of Ira’s supposedly ailing father, the failed marriage of Jesse and Fiona, the complicated marriage of Serena and her late husband Max (and how she felt guilty about feeling relieved when he died of cancer), and even the marriages of random people we meet along the journey, such as the friendly waitress whom Maggie spills her emotions to, or the happy childless neighbors, or the rocky marriage of the elderly man they meet living out of his Chevy (as well as his son’s marriage). We see the idea of marriage as portrayed in Hollywood movies (such as Doris Day films), or magazine articles offering helpful pointers on how to succeed in marriage, or giant billboards advertising marriage assistance, or even discussions on the radio of “What Makes an Ideal Marriage?” At every turn, we are confronted with examinations of the idea of marriage and we are reminded that there are no real lessons for the most important things in life, from marriage to childbirth to breathing. You simply have to experience it for yourself.
Similarly, we are also forced to reckon with the clumsy protagonist, Maggie Moran, as she stumbles from one flighty ineptitude into another. Maggie is frustrating, meddlesome, and feckless, yet she is also good-natured and lovable. She means well, whether she is flirting with an older gentleman at the nursing home where she works, or telling her life story to random strangers. After all, who among us wouldn’t forgive a grandmother for wanting to grow closer with her granddaughter? She seems to have made it her life’s work to reunite her son with his ex-wife, but as the novel ends, Maggie seems resigned to their separation. She wonders what her purpose in life will be now: “‘Oh, Ira,’ she said dropping down beside him, ‘what are we two going to live for, all the rest of our lives?’” (323).
I found Breathing Lessons to be a delightfully warm novel, comic in outlook while masking a certain sadness and longing lurking beneath the surface. With a nice mixture of silly and serious prose, Breathing Lessons is an eminently readable novel, even if it is not one of the truly great works among the Pulitzer Prize-winners in my opinion. It received favorable reviews in The New York Times from Michiko Kakutani and Edward Hoagland, and as Robert McCrum wrote in a 2015 review of the book in The Guardian: “Breathing Lessons, for which Anne Tyler won a Pulitzer in 1989, displays her extraordinary gifts in supreme harmony: exquisite narrative clarity, faultless comic timing, and the Tyler trademark of happy-sad characters inspiring a mid-American domestic drama that somehow slips the surly bonds of the quotidian to become timeless and universal.”
Notable Quotations
“Maggie and Ira Moran had to go to a funeral in Deer Lick, Pennsylvania” (opening line).
“Men just generated wired and cords and electrical tape everywhere they went, somehow. They might not even be aware of it” (8).
“‘The other day,’ Maggie told Ira, ‘I forgot how to say ‘car pool’” (9).
“‘Ira, will you drop it?’ Maggie asked. ‘Don’t you see I have a lot on my mind? I’m heading toward the funeral of my oldest, dearest friend’s husband’s husband: no telling what Serena’s dealing with right now, and here I am, a whole state away. And then on top of that I have to hear on the radio that Fiona’s getting married, when it’s plain as the nose on your face she and Jesse still love each other. They’ve always loved each other; they never stopped; it’s just that they can’t, oh, connect, somehow. And besides that, my one and only grandchild is all at once going to have to adjust to a brand-new stepfather. I feel like we’re just flying apart! All my friends and relatives just flying off from me like the… expanding universe or something! Now we’ll never see that child, do you realize that!’” (10).
“Fiona must have forgotten how much in love she had been at the start, how she had trailed after Jesse and that rock band of his. She must have put it out of her mind on purpose, for she was no more immune than Ira. Maggie had seen the way her face fell when they arrived for Leroy’s first birthday and Jesse turned out not to be with them. It was pride at work nowl injured pride. ‘But remember?’ Maggie would ask her. ‘Remember those early days when all you cared about was being near each other? Remember how you’d walk everywhere together, each with a hand in the rear pocket of the other’s jeans’ That had seemed sort of tacky at the time, but now it made her eyes fill with tears” (22).
“She’d lived her entire life with the hum of the city, she realized. You’d think Baltimore was kept running by some giant, ceaseless, underground machine. How had she stood it? Just like that, she gave up any plan for returning” (34).
“She had assumed when she married Ira that he would always look at her the way he’d looked at her that first night, when she stood in front of him in her trousseau negligee and the only light in the room was the filmy shaded lamp by the bed. She had unbuttoned her top button and then her next-to-top button, just enough to let the negligee slip from her shoulders and hesitate and fall around her ankles. He had looked directly her eyes, and it seemed he wasn’t even breathing. She had assumed that would go on forever” (36).
“But Maggie remembered, and sometimes, feeling the glassy sheet of Ira’s disapproval, she grew numbly, wearily certain that there was no such thing on this earth as real change. You could change husbands, but not the situation. You could change who, but not what. We’re all just spinning here, she thought, and she pictured the world as a little blue teacup, revolving like those rides at Kiddie Land where everyone is pinned to his place by centrifugal force” (45-46).
‘What would it be like, I wonder,’ Serena said. ‘Just to look around you one day and have it all amaze you –where you’d arrived at, who you’d married, what kind of person you’d grown into’” (53).
“The striking thing about death, she thought, was its eventfulness. It made you see you were leading a real life. Real life at last! you could say. Was that why she read the obituaries each morning, hunting familiar names? Was that why she carried on those hushed, awed conversations with other workers when one of the nursing home patients was carted away n a hearse?” (66-67).
“She glanced around and saw a semicircle of graying men and women, and there was something so worn down about them, so benign and unassuming, that she felt at that moment they were as close to her as family. She wondered how she could have failed to realize that they would have been aging along with her all these years, going through more or less the same stages –rearing their children and saying goodbye to them, marveling at the wrinkles they discovered in the mirror, watching their parents turn fragile and uncertain. Somehow, she had pictured them still fretting over Prom Night” (87).
“For the past several months now, Ira had been noticing the human race’s wastefulness. People were squandering their lives it seemed to him. They were splurging their energies on petty jealousies or vain ambitions or long-standing, bitter grudges. It was a theme that emerged wherever he turned, as if someone were trying to tell him something. Not that he needed to be told. Didn’t he know well enough all he himself had wasted?” (125).
“‘Same old song and dance’ –that was ow Jesse had once referred to marriage” (157).
“Well, face it, there were worse careers than cutting forty-five-degree angles in strips of gilded molding. And he did have Maggie, eventually –dropping into his lap like a wonderful gift out of nowhere. He did have two normal, healthy children. Mabe his life wasn’t exactly what he had pictured when he was eighteen, but whose was? That was how things worked, most often” (160).
“He had known then what the true waste was: Lord, yes. It was not his having to support these people but his failure to notice how he loved them. He loved even his worn-down, defeated father, even the memory of his poor mother who had always been so pretty and never realized it because anytime she approached a mirror she had her mouth drawn up lopsided with shyness… But then the feeling had faded…” (174).
“‘Breathing lessons –really,’ she said, dropping to the floor with a thud. ‘Don’t they reckon I must know how to breathe by now?’” (179-180).
“Then she saw in the crowd on deck (for se was taking a boat trip, all at once) a child who resembled Jesse, standing with his parents, whom she had never seen before. He glanced over at her and looked quickly away, but she could tell that he thought she seemed familiar. She smiled at him. He glanced at her again and then looked away again. She edged a few inches closer, meanwhile pretending to study the horizon. He had come back to life in another family; that was how she explained it to herself. He wasn’t hers now, but never mind, she would start over. She would win him to her side. She felt his eyes alight on her once more and she sensed how puzzled he was, half remembering her and half not; and she knew that it meant underneath, he and she would always love each other” (226).
“Then Jesse wrapped his arms around her and dropped his head to her shoulder, and something about that picture –his dark head next to her blond one—reminded Maggie of the way she used to envision marriage before she was married herself. She had thought of it as more different than it really was, somehow, more of an alteration in people’s lives –two opposites drawn together with a dramatic crashing sound. She had supposed that when she was married all her old problems would fall away, something like when you go on vacation and leave a few knotty tasks incomplete as if you’d never have to come back and face them. And of course, she had been wrong. But watching Jesse and Fiona, she could almost believe that that early vision was the right one. She slipped into the house, shutting the screen door very softly behind her, and she decided everything was going to work out after all” (243).
“Sifting through these layers of belongings while Ira stood mute behind her, Maggie had a sudden view of her life as circular. It forever repeated itself, and it was entirely lacking in hope” (312).
The 1989 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1989 Fiction Jury consisted of the following three members:
- Chair: Jonathan Yardley (1939-present) is a former book critic at The Washington Star (1978-1981) and former book critic at The Washington Post (1981-2014) where he ran a column entitled “Second Reading” beginning in 2003, a series which highlighted lesser known books from the past. He was known as a scathingly frank reviewer who championed authors like Michael Chabon, Edward P. Jones, Anne Tyler, William Boyd, Olga Grushin, and John Berendt. Yardley received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1981 for his book reviews in The Washington Star. He is an alumnus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Neiman Fellow at Harvard University, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters by George Washington University in 1987. His two sons with his first wife, Jim Yardley and William Yardley, are both journalists for the New York Times, and William also writes for the Los Angeles Times. Yardley and his son Jim are one of two father-son recipients of the Pulitzer Prize (his son Jim Yardley received the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for his stories in the New York Times, alongside Joseph Kahn, on “ragged justice in China as the booming nation’s legal system evolves”). Jonathan Yardley previously served as chair of the 1981 fiction jury.
- Laurie Colwin (1944-1992) was a writer who wrote five novels, three collections of short stories, and two volumes of essays and recipes. She was particularly known for her writings on New York society and her food columns in Gourmet magazine. Her work was also featured in The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Allure, and Playboy. She married Juris Jurjevics (died 2018) and they had one son. Colwin died unexpectedly in 1992 in Manhattan from an aortic aneurysm at the age of 48.
- Peter S. Prescott (1935-2004) was an author and long-time book critic for Newsweek. In 1978, he won the George Polk Award for criticism. His father was Orville Prescott, book critic for The New York Times (1942-1966) who also served as a Pulitzer Prize fiction jury member in the past. His books included two collections of critical essays, a study of the juvenile-justice system and a memoir of his freshman year at Harvard. He also published a book on his criticism entitled Never in Doubt: Critical Essays on American Books, 1972-1985 (1986). He was an alumnus of Harvard University and studied for a spell at the Sorbonne. He died of liver complications resulting from diabetes in 2004. He was survived by his wife and two children. He previously served as chair of the fiction jury in 1987.
The Fiction Jury found 1989 to be a bland year in American fiction, and thus they only selected two possible contenders for the prize (Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver and Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler). The Jury Report stated: “It is the unanimous judgment of this jury that 1988 was an uncommonly weak year for American fiction. As a result it has been difficult to find any books that are of sufficient merit to deserve the Pulitzer Prize, much less to agree on three that can be submitted to the Board in good conscience. Of the dozens of books that have been nominated, only two have the support of all three judges and no others have the support of a two-judge majority. When we reported this to Robert Christopher [Pulitzer Prize administrator from 1981-1992], he suggested that we consider presenting to the Board not merely the two we favor but also three others, each having the support of only one judge. We have given this the most careful thought, and have discovered that only one judge considers one other book to be deserving of a Pulitzer Prize in fiction – and that this book is strongly opposed by both other judges… This being the case, we feel that our only proper course is to submit just those two titles that all three of us favor. We wish that it were otherwise, both because we would prefer to give the Board the widest possible choice and because, as regular readers of American fiction, we wish we had found more good books among which to choose. But we take the Pulitzer Prize seriously, and do not care to recommend any books that we regard as unworthy of the high standards it represents. We would like to emphasize as strongly as possible that in nominating only two books we are not trying to limit the Board’s options or to force its hand; in our opinion both of these books are works of indisputable quality, and either will be a distinguished addition to the list of Pulitzer winners.”
Of Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver, the Jury Report stated: “This is the definitive collection of stories by a writer who has been a major influence on American fiction and who died shortly after its publication… The revival in recent years of the short story is attributable in great measure to Carver’s mastery of the form.”
Of Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler, the Jury Report stated: “This writer’s eleventh novel is one of her best, though quieter in tone than such deservedly popular books as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist. Within the space of a single day, it contemplates the entire life of a marriage, and in so doing demonstrates how that marriage has endured despite the foibles and doubts of the two partners. Maggie, the wife, is perhaps the most fully realized female character Tyler has thus far created. Tyler is one of our most serious and accomplished novelists, and here she writes with characteristic humor and insight.”
According to the Observer, the morning after Breathing Lessons won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, “she politely dismissed an inquisitive reporter with the explanation that she was too busy writing to talk; they had interrupted her in the middle of a sentence. ‘Allergic’ to interviews, Tyler is a writer not a celebrity. Outside the New York loop of young, edgy literati and excluded from the Gentlemen’s Club of elder literary statesmen, Tyler, now in her 60s, lives in quiet, productive seclusion in Baltimore, where nearly all her novels are set.”
Who is Anne Tyler?
Anne Tyler (1941-present) was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She was the eldest of four siblings in a progressive Quaker family. She graduated at nineteen-years-old from Duke University (where she first started publishing short stories) and went on to do graduate work in Russian Studies at Columbia University (an area of study she later admitted was a little unusual in Cold War America). She left Columbia graduate school after a year, having completed course work but not her master’s thesis. She then returned to Duke and worked in the library as a Russian bibliographer where she also continued publishing short stories, some of which were featured The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, and Harpers (though to date, her short stories have never been published as a collection). Here, she met Taghi Mohammad Modarressi, an Iranian resident in child psychiatry at Duke Medical School and a writer and novelist himself. They were married seven months later in 1963, had two daughters (Tezh and Mitra), and remained married until Modarressi’s death of lymphoma in 1997 at age 65.
One of Tyler’s chief influences has been Eudora Welty (a fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner) and they actually later shared the same literary agent: Diarmuid Russell of Reynolds Price. Her first novel If Morning Ever Comes was published in 1964 followed by another The Tin Can Tree the following year, however years later, Tyler would disown her early novels, expressing an interest in burning them. She and her husband moved around during their early marriage, and with two young children Tyler did not publish anything from 1965-1970, but when she began writing, her writing quality improved (in her own opinion), particularly with novels like Celestial Navigation (1974) which earned the praise of John Updike. Her books also started receiving favorable reviews from the likes of Joyce Carol Oates. Tyler has said she considers her ninth novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, her best work. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, PEN/Faulkner Award, and the American Book Award for Fiction in 1983. Her tenth novel, The Accidental Tourist, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985, the Ambassador Book Award for Fiction in 1986, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 (it was also made into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis). This was followed by her Pulitzer win for her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, which was featured as Time magazine’s “Book of the Year” and then adapted into a 1994 television Hallmark movie. Since Breathing Lessons, she has published fourteen novels, many of which have become Book of the Month Club selections and New York Times bestsellers as well as major award winners. A Spool of Blue Thread (2015), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road (2020) was also longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. Additionally, Tyler was also shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize 2011, a unique award issued between 2005-2015, honoring an author’s entire body of work.
Anne Tyler apparently lives in the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland where many of her novels are set (there is actually an “Anne Tyler” tour of the area). For many years, Tyler rarely granted face-to-face interviews and hardly ever made public appearances. In 2012, she relented and gave her first face-to-face interview in almost 40 years and she has since given a handful of interviews to major news outlets. These interviews have revealed some fascinating glimpses into her writing process: Tyler is apparently disciplined and consistent with her schedule and environment, beginning in the early morning and generally working until 2pm, she uses a small, orderly corner room in her house where the only distractions are the sounds of “children playing outside, and birds.” She begins her daily writing by reviewing her previous day’s work and then apparently staring off into space for a time as an “extension of daydreaming” which focuses her mind on her characters. She prefers to write her first drafts in longhand on a sofa and later type them up. She keeps a collection of index cards with ideas and inspiration for her stories. She once told the Observer that “I start every book thinking ‘This one will be different’ and it’s not. I have my limitations. I am fascinated by how families work, endurance, how do we get through life.”
As of the time I am writing this review, Anne Tyler has just turned 84-years-old (October 25, 2025).
Film Adaptations
- Breathing Lessons (1994), a Hallmark made-for-television film
- Director: John Erman
- Starring: James Garner and Joanne Woodward
Further Reading
- Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
- The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Literary Context 1988-1989
- 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature: awarded to the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) “who, through works rich in nuance – now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous – has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind.” He is the first and (to date) only Arabic–Egyptian recipient of the prize.
- 1988 National Book Award Winner: Paris Trout by Pete Dexter (Breathing Lessons was nominated).
- 1988 Booker Prize Winner: Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1988 was The Cardinal of the Kremlin by Tom Clancy. Others included Zoya by Danielle Steel, The Icarus Agenda by Robert Ludlum, Alaska by James A. Michener.
- Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye was published.
- Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games was published.
- Michael Blake’s Dances with Wolves was published.
- Orson Scott Card’s Treason was published.
- Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories was published.
- Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was published.
- Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist was published.
- Don DeLillo’s Libra was published.
- Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum was published.
- John Gardner’s Scorpius was published.
- Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs was published.
- Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child was published.
- Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was published.
- Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes was published.
- Frank Miller’s comic book Batman: Year One was published.
- Alan Moore’s comic book Batman: The Killing Joke was published.
- Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance was published.
- Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees was published.
- Roald Dahl’s Matilda was published.
- P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins and the House Next Door was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
For the 1989 Pulitzer Prize, I find myself in agreement with the Fiction Jury –“1988 was an uncommonly weak year for American fiction.” Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons is a charming, comical, pallet-cleanser among the Pulitzer Prize-winners, but one still wonders –since Salman Rushdie was still about a decade away from emigrating to the United States—why wasn’t Don DeLillo’s Libra considered for the prize this year?
Tyler, Anne. Breathing Lessons. Vintage Books, a Division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, New York, 1988 (republished in 2017).