DIGGING TO AMERICA
by Anne Tyler
Chatto, £16.99; 288pp

SEEK TO KNOW HOW Anne Tyler “works”, why that quiet observer of the spaces between people is so fêted by the likes of John Updike, and you need go no further than the opening paragraphs of her new novel.

She begins in the “nearly deserted” Baltimore airport, where a classic storytelling tone is achieved by the repetition of “and” in this sentence: “The wide gray corridors were empty, and the newsstands were dark, and the coffee shops were closed.” It settles the reader comfortably down, as the “blank signboards” and “unoccupied and ghostly” rows of chairs become the space for the drama.

Then she picks up speed, camera tracking towards a distant crowd of people — and yanking us into the scene: “Step around the bend, then, and you’d come upon what looked like a gigantic baby shower.” People waiting at the gate are wearing badges, which proclaim “mom”, “dad”, “grandma” and even “cousin”. We would like to smile at their expense, murmur, “How naff.”

Yet Tyler does not satirise. She has plonked us right down here with those people, each deftly characterised in a sentence or two, so we start to know them, like our own oddball relatives. We are waiting with them. But for what? Two babies. Two childless couples, one American, one Iranian, are about to meet the Korean baby girls that they have moved heaven and earth to adopt. Specific about the moment (“Friday, August 15th 1997. The night the girls arrived”), Tyler, the quintessential bystander, bears witness to something momentous happening — and the momentum of her style has pushed the reader into empathy for those whose stage we share. This is her method, her quiet virtuosity.

Brad and Bitsy Donaldson are big, plain, older, American, with all the right ideas about cultural identity — so they will dress Jin Ho in authentic Korean clothes when she would prefer blue jeans. Sami and Ziba Yazdan are slim, attractive, young, Iranian — and change Sooki’s name to Susan, because they want her to be American from the start.

The unlikely, fraught friendship between the two families will be forged by Bitsy’s yearly “arrival party”, will ebb and flow, full of misunderstanding and affection, until the final paragraph, which is as obliquely moving as anything Tyler has written. Though the novel shifts perspectives, the pivotal character is Sami’s mother Maryam, who (after years) is exasperated and amused by Americans, and refuses to feel that she belongs, “still and forever a guest”.

The House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus, set Iranian against American, capturing the dark side of the immigrant experience; Tyler places Iranian beside American to observe differences transcended by common values. Admirers of Dubus’s magnificent novel may find this too gentle, glossing over (as it does, Jane Austen-like) tensions in the larger world — so September 11 casts its shadow only through increased airport security. Dubus addresses the moral landscape of late 20th-century America, but Tyler aims to chart the moments that shape individual lives. Warm and optimistic, this story about adoption raises issues of belonging and identity — and salutes the reticent courage of individuals who smile and endure within their private space.

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