In a piece for Guardian Review today, Mark Lawson suggests that Anne Tyler's high critical reputation among male as well as female readers may be due to the fact that 'the masculine psyche is a central Tyler concern' - 'that she deals sympathetically and redemptively with male fecklessness and helplessness'. The suggestion is echoed by Tyler herself, in an interview in the same place:
Why does she think her novels have such a strong male following? "Maybe it is because I really like men," she ponders...
For my own part, I love Anne Tyler's books, as I've explained here, and though her sympathetic view of men may have influenced me in doing so, it's not something I would have picked out as especially prominent; indeed I didn't pick it out. I don't mean to challenge what Mark Lawson says, having no expertise whatever on male reading patterns and preferences, but the very question why men should like Anne Tyler's books strikes me as odd. I haven't come across the reverse kind of question: why women readers should like, say, Henry James, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Edward St Aubyn. This shows that even here, in a sphere where women flourish, where the record of their achievement is truly staggering, the world is not yet on an even keel, so to say. Why males might like a female writer is still a question; why women appreciate the writing of men is not.
Anyway, I wouldn't have thought of Anne Tyler's work in the way Mark Lawson suggests simply because there is a very large number of women writers whose writing I've read with great pleasure - among them:
Jane Austen, Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Nancy Mitford, Mary McCarthy, Iris Murdoch, Betty Miller, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Jenkins, F.M. Mayor, Dorothy Whipple, Penelope Fitzgerald, Muriel Spark, Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Strout, Marina Endicott, Hilary Mantel, Susan Hill, Margaret Forster, Rose Tremain, Tracy Chevalier, Maggie O'Farrell, Zoë Heller, Sarah Waters, Catherine O'Flynn, Tove Jannson...
Of course, I've enjoyed the books of these writers in different ways and for different reasons, and I don't hold them all in equal regard; I have favourites among them. The same, however, could be said of any list of male writers that I like. If I have to give a general answer to why I rate these women writers, it would be the answer I would give for why I like Charles Dickens, Henry James, Richard Yates, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Anthony Powell, William Trevor, John McGahern and so forth. It would be that women make up (roughly) half the human race and, within this vast assembly of female literary talent, there is a volume of perception about human relationships, an understanding of the complexities of individual psychology, a capacity for dramatic story-telling, a window on the vicissitudes of the world, on love, ambition, ageing, disappointment, joy, homecoming and departure, misunderstanding and reconciliation, triumph and tragedy, that should impress any reader, male or female, who is open to the richness of human experience.