25 & Trying

Digging to America

Digging to America by Anne Tyler

The latest book in my repertoire has been 100% out of character. It seemed to me originally like one of those books that was random. It said “New York Times Bestseller,” but that didn’t exactly denote a guaranteed  good read. And in some ways, I was right.

I struggled through the first 4 chapters of this tale – and wasn’t sad to be finished with it. Overall, it is a story of two families – one Iranian, and one devastatingly American – who adopt baby girls from Korea that wind up being on the same plane. From this point forward, the Donaldsons and Yazdans share a connectedness that follows them throughout the childhood of the girls – Jin-Ho and Susan.

Ethnicity, cultural understanding, assimilation and identity are all the major themes of the work. The Iranian mother-in-law, Maryam, is the most intriguing and interesting character.

She has been in America since the fall of the Shah, but seems unable to define herself as such. She loves her new Korean granddaughter, but struggles with what people must do to “become American.” The American family, on the other hand, displays the typical fascination that suburban mothers sometimes have with foreigners. Exotic food! Wonderful clothes! Interesting customs!

All of these things overlap as the families become closer to each other over the years. My main flaw with the book was that these understandings were left underdeveloped. For a book nearing the 300-page mark, I expected a better connection to the young girls around whom the story is built. I feel little closeness to them, and they are so young that their perspectives aren’t really shared at all.

I did feel a closeness to Maryam, and how she views her romantic entanglement with the grandfather in the Donaldson family. She is caught between loving the independence of being a widowed woman enjoying her life, as well as wanting desperately to have connections with others.

I have heard wonderful things about Tyler’s writings (She won the Pulitzer Prize for another work she produced in 1988 called Breathing Lessons), but somehow I just felt myself reading the words on the page without a deep understanding of where she was headed. I waited for a climax that didn’t arrive – except on the VERY high emotional level. The families who struggled for so long to understand each other accept their differences…but even this is my assumption. It is not really conveyed to the reader.

I think the best thing anyone can take away from this book is that it’s a unique idea – the interview with the author section at the back of my copy shared that Tyler herself witnessed the arrival of a new adopted baby in the U.S. while she was at an airport. Interesting and engaging premise – muddy execution.