September 28, 2009

Digging to America

Anne Tyler's Digging to America is a story that appears to be about two families that adopted from Korea, but is, in fact the story of one of the Grandmothers as she grapples with her "otherness". She immigrated from Iran.
"Oh," she said, " sometimes I get so tired of being foreign I want to lie down and die. It's a lot of work, bring foreign."
The two families strive to be friends, though they annoy one another and privately criticize each other's ways. For me, this makes the novel hard to buy into, as I can't imagine these as real people who call this a real friendship. Why bother trying to be friends with people you don't actually like?
It wasn't just age that made the difference (although that helped, no doubt); it was more that she had winnowed out the people she wasn't at ease with. [ . . . ] "Why should I bother? This is one good thing about getting old: I know what I like and what I don't like."
Why wait until we are old?

All-in-all, it was a good book, but not a great book.

~Suzanne

1 comment:

Thanks for joining our discussion of this book!

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