Book: Digging to America
Jul. 5th, 2010 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Anne Tyler
Details: (c) Anne Tyler 2006; Pub Vintage 2007; ISBN 978-0-099-49939-8
Verdict: Digging to America creates a very sympathetic cast of characters and involves the reader in their lives.
Reasons for reading it: I am a fan of Anne Tyler. Also, the book I most wanted to read next is a huge honking hardback and I wanted something portable to take with me while I was travelling.
How it came into my hands: Libary.
Digging to America is ostensibly about two couples who adopt Korean children, which is itself a very interesting topic. But the real focus of the story is about Maryam Karimzadeh, the grandmother of one of the adopted girls, who came to the US from Iran as a young bride. It's about her experience of being an immigrant, assimilating in some ways but never quite feeling she belongs, watching her son grow up American, though still in some ways an outsider. The adoption plot allows her to encounter the family of the other adoptee, people she sees as being all-American, though the book makes it very clear that they are individuals with their own problems and not just "typical" Americans whose lives are perfect because they are not immigrants. I absolutely adore this kind of culture clash story, particularly when it's presented in such a nuanced way; nobody is an embodiment of "Persian" or "American" culture, but there are class differences, political differences and just plain individual differences between the different Iranians and Americans. Interestingly the book doesn't really deal with the two girls' experiences of being ethnically Korean but brought up in America from babyhood, doesn't draw any obvious parallels between the adoption situation the immigration situation. This makes sense as the book only covers the first 7 years of the girls' lives, so it is much more about the adults in their families, though I'd certainly be very interested to see a sequel about how Jin-Ho and Susan grow up and develop their own identities and reactions to their heritage and culture.
Anne Tyler is in some ways the American equivalent of Joanna Trollope: she writes very well indeed about ordinary people having ordinary lives, but really makes the reader see why the characters' lives are important to them. She tends to be a bit less focused on romance than Trollope, except in as far as falling in love or ending a relationship tends to be an important part of most people's lives. I don't know if her depictions are actually realistic or if she's just really, really convincing, but reading Tyler gives me a sense of what life is like in the parts of the US that aren't New York, California or university campuses, for the kind of people who aren't particularly beautiful or rich or heroic or generally the sort of people who get portrayed in films and litfic. I really enjoyed the characterization; you've got quite a large number of people who are all three-dimensional and have inner lives, and aren't just adjuncts to a protagonist. Just as in real life, everybody has a range of closer and more distant connections, and everybody's views of their friends and relatives differs from people's own self-perceptions. Tyler portrays people with some flaws and some annoying habits, and you can sympathize both with the people who get irritated with them, and the irritating people themselves. Bitsy in particular could very easily be a stereotype or just the butt of jokes, but she is drawn with a great deal of sensitivity.
All in all I found this an extremely satisfying read, often moving, and really very much the kind of thing I like.
Details: (c) Anne Tyler 2006; Pub Vintage 2007; ISBN 978-0-099-49939-8
Verdict: Digging to America creates a very sympathetic cast of characters and involves the reader in their lives.
Reasons for reading it: I am a fan of Anne Tyler. Also, the book I most wanted to read next is a huge honking hardback and I wanted something portable to take with me while I was travelling.
How it came into my hands: Libary.
Digging to America is ostensibly about two couples who adopt Korean children, which is itself a very interesting topic. But the real focus of the story is about Maryam Karimzadeh, the grandmother of one of the adopted girls, who came to the US from Iran as a young bride. It's about her experience of being an immigrant, assimilating in some ways but never quite feeling she belongs, watching her son grow up American, though still in some ways an outsider. The adoption plot allows her to encounter the family of the other adoptee, people she sees as being all-American, though the book makes it very clear that they are individuals with their own problems and not just "typical" Americans whose lives are perfect because they are not immigrants. I absolutely adore this kind of culture clash story, particularly when it's presented in such a nuanced way; nobody is an embodiment of "Persian" or "American" culture, but there are class differences, political differences and just plain individual differences between the different Iranians and Americans. Interestingly the book doesn't really deal with the two girls' experiences of being ethnically Korean but brought up in America from babyhood, doesn't draw any obvious parallels between the adoption situation the immigration situation. This makes sense as the book only covers the first 7 years of the girls' lives, so it is much more about the adults in their families, though I'd certainly be very interested to see a sequel about how Jin-Ho and Susan grow up and develop their own identities and reactions to their heritage and culture.
Anne Tyler is in some ways the American equivalent of Joanna Trollope: she writes very well indeed about ordinary people having ordinary lives, but really makes the reader see why the characters' lives are important to them. She tends to be a bit less focused on romance than Trollope, except in as far as falling in love or ending a relationship tends to be an important part of most people's lives. I don't know if her depictions are actually realistic or if she's just really, really convincing, but reading Tyler gives me a sense of what life is like in the parts of the US that aren't New York, California or university campuses, for the kind of people who aren't particularly beautiful or rich or heroic or generally the sort of people who get portrayed in films and litfic. I really enjoyed the characterization; you've got quite a large number of people who are all three-dimensional and have inner lives, and aren't just adjuncts to a protagonist. Just as in real life, everybody has a range of closer and more distant connections, and everybody's views of their friends and relatives differs from people's own self-perceptions. Tyler portrays people with some flaws and some annoying habits, and you can sympathize both with the people who get irritated with them, and the irritating people themselves. Bitsy in particular could very easily be a stereotype or just the butt of jokes, but she is drawn with a great deal of sensitivity.
All in all I found this an extremely satisfying read, often moving, and really very much the kind of thing I like.
