Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe  

As she explores the myriad ways in which dreams get deferred and hopes revised, infusing the prosaic details of domestic life with honor, humor, and deep affection, it is Anne Tylers achievement to raise ordinariness to an art form.

The Christian Science Monitor

With her picture-perfect Baltimore world of scraped knees, lost jobs and even lifelong grief, Tyler has staked out a singular territory; it is not so much nobility or tear-blinking fortitude that keeps her characters moving but more often their goofy, thoroughly human essence. Her depiction of Ians transformation is extraordinary.

The Boston Globe

The pleasure of reading Anne Tyler lies in listening to disparate people, watching out for the odd impressions that creep into the margins of their tales. Seen this way, the moral message of SAINT MAYBE oddly resembles a medieval tapestry.

Time

Tyler has the gift of keeping her characters in clear sight as they wax, wane and turn unexpected corners along the passage of time.

Los Angeles Times

Tyler crafts a warmly beguiling tale that sometimes echoes such previous works as SEARCHING FOR CALEB, DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT and, especially, THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST. Here again are lifes endearing misfits, occasionally suffering pangs of self-awareness. Here is that special blend of playfulness and poignancy, the oh-so-true dialogue, the specificity of detail and image. Heart-wrenching.

The Orlando Sentinel

Engaging SAINT MAYBE is a first-rate novel, told with quiet but fiercely heart-wrenching authority. Tyler writes in an earnest, plainspoken prose, underscoring her choice to make story itself, rather than style, the means to fictional magic.

New York Newsday

A warm and generous novel Each character in SAINT MAYBE has been fully rendered, fleshed out with a palpable interior life, and each has been fit, like a hand-sawed jigsaw-puzzle piece, into the matrix of family life.

The New York Times

by any standard and a worthy addition to Ms. Tylers impressive body of work SAINT MAYBE is a gentle, insightful rendering of a troubled family. This novel wont harm Ms. Tylers reputation as one of our finest prose stylists. Her special gifts are an unassuming but precise descriptive power, an unerring eye for detail and a graceful, unhurried style that conveys perfectly her generous and humane view of family life.

Atlanta Journal & Constitution

Tylers novels are always a pleasure to read, and with the decline of minimalist fiction writers, Tylers sympathetic and sentimental attic-of-family-secrets has the American family all to itself.

The Detroit News

Exquisitely crafted SAINT MAYBE is classic Tyler: wry, offbeat and engaging, with sentences to die for.

The Miami Herald

Perfection.

The Kirkus Reviews

Finishing a Tyler novel is like waking from a dream-filled sleep. She has a gift for drawing readers into her world. Her books are hard to put down. SAINT MAYBE deals movingly with Ians self-loathing, his heroic sacrifices and, finally, with his redemption. SAINT MAYBE is a joy to read.

The Denver Post

Wondrous Every few years Anne Tyler brings out a novel and makes originality again something to appreciate. How fiction that is so modest and unself-conscious, so teeming with melancholic characters, can be so absolutely funny and dazzlingly memorable is, of course, a secret locked inside Tylers mild-mannered features, which peer out from her dust-jacket photographs.

Kansas City Star

Tyler does her usual marvelous job of creating odd and slightly crazy but lovable characters peculiarly suited to her blue-collar, Baltimore neighborhoods. The wisdom behind all of Anne Tylers fiction is a loving acceptance of the peculiar but surprisingly predictable habits of individual humans, of all their inherent frailties and eccentricities. Anne Tyler is a master at discovering these peculiarities and writing about them with clear-eyed affection.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Wonderful A novel that is old-fashioned in its moralism. And completely convincing and refreshing.

Detroit Free Press

Compassionately and convincingly drawn The classic Tyler trademarks appear immediately, the warmth and humor of the narrative voice, as if the novel were being told to us by a friend who creates an engaging character quickly and hooks us to her tale. If you shelve your contemporary novelists alphabetically, as I do, Anne Tyler stands beside John Updike. Theres a metaphor there too powerful to ignore.

St. Petersburg Times

Anne Tyler cuts through the monkey business straight to what is true and real in life. To open one of her books is to open an invitationshe leads you right through the front door, plumps you down on the sofa and surrounds you with her characters, ordinary people coping with the kind of extraordinary things that happen every day. With each new novel she reaches another dimension in her tender exploration of humanity, and reinforces her place among Americas best writers. With her distinctive blend of unforced philosophy, gentle humor and high farce, Tyler takes us into the life of Ian Bedloe as it is turned inside out. The maturing of Ian Bedloe is one of Anne Tylers most subtle designs.

The Buffalo News

The reader is emotionally involved and touched as never before.

Publishers Weekly

By Anne Tyler:

IF MORNING EVER COMES

THE TIN CAN TREE

A SLIPPING-DOWN LIFE

THE CLOCK WINDER

CELESTIAL NAVIGATION

SEARCHING FOR CALEB

EARTHLY POSSESSIONS

MORGANS PASSING

DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT

THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST

THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE

BREATHING LESSONS

SAINT MAYBE

LADDER OF YEARS

A PATCHWORK PLANET

BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWNUPS

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An Ivy Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright 1991 by ATM, Inc

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-52704

eISBN: 978-0-307-78456-8

This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

v3.1

1

O n Waverly Street, everybody knew everybody else. It was only one short block, after alla narrow strip of patched and repatched pavement, bracketed between a high stone cemetery wall at one end and the commercial clutter of Govans Road at the other. The trees were elderly maples with lumpy, bulbous trunks. The squat clapboard houses seemed mostly front porch.