but struggles with loneliness and dealing with day-to-day demands of an older single woman living in a big old house. Reviews Michiko Kakutani wrote in her New York Times review: "Though The Amateur Marriage can leave the longtime Tyler fan with the sense that the author is simply reconnoitering territory long ago annexed and mapped out, it is so psychologically detailed that the story as a whole stands as one of her more convincing efforts: an ode to the complexities of familial love, the centripetal and centrifugal forces that keep families together and send their members flying apart, the supremely ordinary pleasures and frustrations of middle-class American life." William H. Pritchard: "The Amateur Marriage is...Tyler's most ambitious work, ranging over 60 years of American experience, from the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to the anniversary of that day in 2001....An aspect of Tyler's slyness lies in her ability to write sentences that seem to present no resistance, that are perfectly clear in their direction, that don't send up metaphorical gestures by way of suggesting the inexpressibility of life. Yet such writing is beautifully accurate, more often than not with a glinting vein of humor. ...Tyler's grip on her characters and their pathos is similarly mischievous, but its focus is steady and unerring. The book also touches levels deeper than mischief...to spend the last third of the novel demonstrating (as one of the chapter titles has it) that The World Won't End. Tragedy ends after the big mistake has been made and paid for, but comedy goes on its way, devoted to showing how everyone is necessarily mistaken." References External links New York Times review 2004 American novels Alfred A. Knopf books Novels by Anne Tyler Novels set in San Francisco Novels set in Baltimore Fiction set in 1941 Novels set in the 1940s