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- Breathing Lessons is a touching novel by Anne Tyler that follows the journey of a middle-aged couple, Maggie and Ira, as they navigate the complexities of marriage and parenthood. With tender moments and relatable struggles, it delves into the beauty of everyday life.
www.blinkist.com/en/books/breathing-lessons-enBreathing Lessons Summary of Key Ideas and Review - Blinkist
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Breathing Lessons is a Pulitzer Prize –winning 1988 novel by American author Anne Tyler. It is her eleventh novel and won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Plot. The story describes the joys and pains of the ordinary marriage of Ira and Maggie Moran as they travel from Baltimore to attend a funeral and back home again in one day.
Complete summary of Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons. eNotes plot summaries cover all the significant action of Breathing Lessons.
In Tyler's latest testing of the strangulating tugs and miraculous stretch of familial and marital ties, a middle-aged Baltimore couple (inexplicably linked, like so many of Tyler's lovers) take a one-day's detour-clogged trip to a funeral.
- Kirkus Reviews
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Media Adaptations
- Themes
- Style
- Topics For Further Study
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
A highly regarded author of short stories and novels, Anne Tyleris known for her fiction that explores the vicissitudes of human existence in late twentieth-century America. Tyler's readers readily identify with her complex characters and see their own experiences mirrored in her fiction. She often makes her readers laugh out loud, but she also mak...
On October, 25, 1941, Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her parents were members of the Society of Friends and liberal activists, and the family lived in a series of Quaker communes across the Midwest and South of the United States. Anne read voraciously as a child and began write stories at the age of seven. When she was eleven, the f...
Part One: The Funeral
The novel opens with Ira reflecting on the amount of waste in the world, including his own life. Ira runs his father's picture framing business in Baltimore, while Maggie works as a nurse in a nursing home. On this Saturday they are preparing to go to a funeral, and Maggie is picking up their car from the mechanic's shop. As she drives home, she listens to a call-in radio program, and is convinced that the woman announcing her impending marriage is former daughter-in-law, Fiona. She collects...
Part Two: Breakdown
As in the beginning of the novel, Ira reflects on the opportunities he has missed and the regrets he has about his life. This section is narrated from Ira's perspective, as the couple begins the drive home and Maggie tries to convince him to visit Fiona. On the way, they become stuck behind an erratic driver who nearly runs them off the road. Maggie gets revenge by motioning that the car's wheel is about to come off, but instantly regrets her actions when she sees that the driver is an elderl...
Part Three: Homecoming
Maggie reflects on her life: the absence of her granddaughter, then her cat, and her humidifier. It seems that she can't keep anything in perspective. She remembers Fiona's pregnancy—her "breathing lessons." When they arrive at Fiona's house, Leroy doesn't recognize them. While Ira teaches his granddaughter how to play Frisbee, Maggie tries to make Fiona agree to try again with her ex-husband. Maggie invents a story to persuade Fiona how much her son, Jesse, still loves her: she claims that h...
Durwood Clegg
Durwood is one of the few people with whom Maggie has kept in touch from high school. She turned down a date with him because, like her own father, Durwood is "too pliant … too supplicating." When Ira refuses to sing with Maggie at the memorial service, Durwood volunteers to help.
Ben Gabriel
Former owner of a power-tool company, Mr. Gabriel is a patient at the Silver Threads Nursing where Maggie works. For a short time she develops an infatuation with him, until she realizes that he reminds her of her husband.
Serena Gill
Serena is a childhood friend of Maggie's. When her husband dies, Maggie and Ira embark on a road trip to attend the memorial service. An eccentric woman, Serena displays her own gypsystyle of dress at the service: sandals, a red dress with a vneck cut and rhinestone sunburst, and a black shawl. In addition, she decides to reenact her wedding at the funeral. Most of the original participants are present, and she asks each to perform the same duties as they did at the wedding. This is ridiculou...
The television film adaptation of Breathing Lessons was released in 1994. Under the direction of John Erman, the movie starred James Garner, Joanne Woodward, Paul Winfield, and Kathryn Erbe.
Family
The central theme of Tyler's novel is the dynamic of modern American families. Within that theme, Tyler focuses on the fact that an individual's initial sense of identity derives from his or her relationship with his or her family. For Tyler, the family acts as force on an individual, in both positive and negative ways. In Breathing Lessons, each character has an individual interpretation of the concept of family that coincides with their understanding of their own identity. For example, Ira...
Marriage
The question of what an ideal marriage recurs in the novel. Everyone has a theory about marriage. Serena married because it was time to marry. Maggie married because she thought she had found her soul mate. Jesse thinks of marriage as a bad habit, the "same old song and dance." As the novel points out, there are rituals and a repetitive pattern to marriage—"the same jokes and affectionate pass-words"—and the same "abiding loyalty and gestures of support and consolations." The title of the nov...
Human Condition
Tyler's characters negotiate their lives and their relationships with one another in what critic Alice Petry has described as "a messy chaotic world of happenstance." For Tyler, happenstance is what life is all about, and her characters deal with situations many readers will understand. The ways in which Tyler's characters carry out their negotiation through everyday life differ. These disparate ideas and ways of managing give rise to the humor and the tension of the novel. The clearest examp...
Point of View
Breathing Lessonsutilizes a third-person omniscient narrative, with the middle section told from Ira's point of view. The first and last sections are Maggie's interpretations of events. The two viewpoints allow both character to provide their perspective on their lives and long marriage.
The legal issues of child custody and visitation The legal issues of child custody and visitation rights have become more complex recently. What rights have the courts awarded to grandparents? What...What is the role of game playing in the novel? How do games demonstrate the motif of breathing lessons or support Tyler's large themes?Considered to be a triumph of urban revitalization, how is Harborplace doing today? Locate some pictures or film of the area and provide a description. Has it exceeded the hopes of the city planner...Tyler's novel returns to the topic of the nursing home repeatedly. Research the quality of nursing home care across the United Statesin the late 1980s. How does it compare with the care given in to...Political Apathy
Poor economic conditions at the end of the 1970s led to a change in the political landscape of America. In 1980 Ronald Reagan won the presidential election with only 51.6 percent of the popular vote. His "landslide victory" resulted from a turnout of only fifty-four percent of the voting-age population. In other words, only twenty-seven per-cent of all eligible voters elected Reagan to office. Many commentators expressed disappointment over voter apathy and the lack of democratic participation.
The Decade of Greed and the Working Class
In 1981 Reagan restructured the tax code. His theory that deep tax cuts would be offset by an increase in employment rates and tax revenue through greater capital investment—known as trickle-down theory—was proven false, just as Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief guaranteed. According to Forbes Magazine, the richest one percent of Americans gained a combined total of one trillion dollars between 1979 and 1990. In other words, a greater stratification between rich and poor was the...
Race Relations
In a 1988 Newsweek poll, seventy-one percent of African Americans concurred with the statement that the United States government was not doing enough to help blacks in the United States. The year before, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members assaulted civil rights marchers celebrating the recently established Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in Forsyth County, Georgia. The Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center documented forty-five arson cases and cross burnings, as well as hundreds...
It wasn't until after her fifth novel and Gail Godwin and John Updikewrote positive reviews of her work that Tyler garnered critical and commercial attention. Since then, she has attracted a large following. While Tyler is considered an excellent writer and novelist, her work does not fit with current academic interest and her long-term reputation ...
Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler is a poignant novel that delves into the complexities of marriage and family. Set over the course of a single day, it follows the journey of Maggie and Ira as they drive to a friend's funeral.
- Anne Tyler
Breathing Lessons is a novel rich in vivid, realistic details of action and character. Through the years Tyler’s novels have become increasingly witty, amusing, and opulent in...
Nov 1, 2005 · Unfolding over the course of a single emotionally fraught day, this stunning novel encompasses a lifetime of dreams, regrets and reckonings—and is oftern regarded as Tyler's seminal work. Maggie...
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