I particularly liked this novel when I first read it, and it has stayed with me for thirty years, and I have just re-read it - it is sparser than I remembered it. It seems to me to have some messages.
First, there's the folly of having fixed ideas about people. The mother in the book has such fixed ideas about her own child that she thinks that she's taken the wrong baby home from the hospital. I am not sure whether we are to believe that the main character, Charlotte, is the wrong child. She is tall, thin and dark haired, and her mother is blond and very, very fat. Her mother tells her that her own baby just slipped out, whereas Charlotte had a forceps mark on her face. Yet Charlotte knows that her parents love her. All her childhood she believes that she is the wrong child in the unhappy house, living the wrong life. She wants to get away; to escape.
Charlotte wants to be able to be sure that her own child is her own.
Our daughter was born June2 1961, and the Clarion County Hospital, where I refused all anaesthesia including aspirin so I could be absolutely sure nobody mixed her up with any other baby. We named her Catherine. She had fair skin and light brown hair, but her face was Saul's.
Now, you might think that is just how it is, but actually it is one of the themes of the book - people from the very start are invested with a feeling about their own character, and they make themselves up, often in ways that startle or disappoint their parents.
From the first, it was clear she was bright. She did everything early: sitting, crawling, walking. She put short words together before she was one, and not much later began to tell herself long secret stories at Bedtime. When she was two, she invented a playmate named Selinda. I knew that was normal, and didn't worry about it. I apologized when I stepped on Selinda's toes, and set a place for her at every meal. But after a while, Catherine moved to Selinda's place and left her own place empty. She said she had a friend called Catherine none of us could see. Eventually she stopped talking about Catherine. We seemed to be left with Selinda. We have had Selinda with us ever since. Now that I think of it, I might as well have taken that anaesthesia after all.
But while I am thinking about it, parents also make themselves up, invent themselves in ways that startle and disappoint their children! One crucial character is Charlotte's mother-in-law, Alberta. As a child, Charlotte loves the way that Alberta invests her life with drama. Eventually, Alberta runs away with her own father-in-law, and the family next door - four wayward boys - breaks up. When one of the boys, Saul, comes back, he rents a room with Charlotte and her mama. And falls in love with, and marries Charlotte. They live in Charlotte's huge childhood home, with Alberta's furniture as well as their own. Saul forbids Charlotte to get rid of his mother's furniture. One after another, his brothers come back, and live with them, they have Selinda, and then they have a baby orphan to stay. Charlotte does not expect to hang onto Jiggs (the child) but she loves him unreservedly.
These are the Earthly Possessions of the title. Things we hang onto, ideas we hang onto. Our children are not our possessions. They are ours to love as long as they want to stay. The theme of adoption - either formal or informal - usually informal - is one of Anne Tyler's strongest - her struggle to understand it.
Charlotte retains the idea that she might run away for far too long. But she doesn't try to hang onto other things - she lets Catherine become Selinda. She lets Saul become a preacher, although she doesn't believe in religion. She lets other people come and stay in their home. They see her smiling, as though amused. She's holding on lightly to this life that she believes isn't really hers.
Charlotte has these special circumstances - the chances are good that she was the wrong child - but her attitude is rather like a model for us all. She accepts - perhaps welcomes - the people who come and go, she doesn't try to hang onto them. Her childhood had been lonely and unhappy, but her adulthood is not. Other reviewers think she is unhappy with Saul, because she doesn't understand him, but I think she isn't. I think she doesn't mind the distance between them.
The story of Charlotte's life alternates with scenes in which she is riding along in a stolen car with a bank robber - she's the hostage. But of course, it's not that simple. The bank robber isn't all that clever, and is very unsuccessful at his criminal career, and the traveling Charlotte does, in the end, is at gun point through areas that are depressed and out of the way. Like all the other people in her life but one, he seems to end up needing her.
John Updike reviewed the novel in The New Yorker: "Anne Tyler, in her seventh novel, 'Earthly Possessions', continues to demonstrate a remarkable talent and, for a writer of her acuity, an unusual temperament....Small towns and pinched minds hold room enough for her; she is at peace in the semi-countrified, semi-plasticized northern-Southern America where she and her characters live. Out of this peace flow her unmistakable strengths—serene firm tone; her smoothly spun plots; her apparently inexhaustible access to the personalities of her imagining; her infectious delight in “the smell of beautiful, everyday life”; her lack of any trace of intellectual or political condescension—and her one possible weakness: a tendency to leave the reader just where she found him....Charlotte Emory...belongs to what is becoming a familiar class of Anne Tyler heroines: women admirably active in the details of living yet alarmingly passive in the large curve of their lives—riders on male-generated events, who nevertheless give those events a certain blessing, a certain feasibility."[3]
Yes, Charlotte is passive, but she makes a reasonable contribution to the town of Clarion. One of the things she does is continue her father's business of portrait photography.
She takes pictures of people without seeming to care how they sit or how they look and she captures some quality of drama or self-realisation in the moment of improvising something, that her father couldn't, because his ideas of photography and how people wanted to be represented, were very fixed. Charlotte says she sees them upside-down in the old camera lens - she sees them wrongly, and she knows it, and she doesn't care too much. One feels, without being told, that some of her pictures are masterpieces, artistic in a non-artistic way, a complete collaboration between sitter and photographer.
Passivity is not her trait only - the kidnapper also quotes his old friend:
"Like I told Oliver: I don't plan it like this. Events get out of my control. But Oliver, oh, he could be such a smart-ass. "Your whole life is out of your control", that's what Oliver said. "Your whole life." Smart-ass."Now, how many people can say they have their whole life under their control? That they are never going to wake up and find they have been laid-off, or that their spouse has got Parkinson's, that their child has had an accident in a car, or that their best friend is suffering from a crippling depression? Well, I don't think anyone can say that. Some of your life is under your control - that's all that you can say.
Then there's that fact that in our actions and our choices, we respond to the events and the personalities of our childhood. Is that having control of your life? You don't even know you're doing it until some psychologist points it out to you.
(Anne Tyler makes you think.)
But in the book, Jake, the robber, is very little in control of his life, so you could say he is just as passive as the female protagonist, Charlotte. She is tied to her father and her mother by bonds of love, then tied to her husband and children by the same. This is what holds societies together, but out of his far-seeing masculinity John Updike judges her harshly for this. Saul doesn't, though. He knows Charlotte. When interviewed he says, "My wife is a good woman." What confuses him is that she is not a Christian. She hasn't handed her life over to Christ. Her love is acted in the here and now, for her fat fat helpless mother, (acting mother) her picky father so set in his ways, and all the other people who fall into her life and need some nourishment. Even Saul himself. His need of her is (in part) what she responds to. (She also fancies him crazily.) He needs her because his mother ran away. Amos gets his revenge by being the one who always leaves. Saul re-runs his childhood life as an adult with Charlotte and with her help, tries to make it work out better this time.
So I have read a load of responses to this novel on Amazon, for example, saying: "I didn't like the people. They were old-fashioned." 2 stars. "This isn't one of her best". And I think - actually, this is the most boiled down of her books, it tells all her themes quite brilliantly.
But I found Jake and Mindy quite dull. Poor old Charlotte having to go on a trip with such a hopeless pair!! But the people who travel don't have all the stories, nor the best stories, maybe.
And remember, "We are travelling, travelling, all our lives. We couldn't stop if we tried."
