Anne Tyler’s ‘The Beginner’s Goodbye’: Widower keeps running into his late wife

I hate to say it, but he’s also a particularly difficult character to believe. I’ve read most of Tyler’s novels, and I can’t remember meeting anyone quite so off-key as this narrator. The strange way Aaron moves and speaks has less to do with neurological damage than with the calcifying conventions of the author’s canon. (When Dorothy asks, “I don’t understand. Why does this have to involve food?” someone should have told her, “Because you’re in an Anne Tyler novel.”) Nothing about him suggests we’re in the company of a 35-year-old in the early 21st century; he seems dustier than the 60-year-old in “Noah’s Compass.” “That tickled me no end,” he tells us when he hears Dorothy talking. Confronted by an angry colleague, he exclaims, “Goodness.” Seeing his dead wife standing in the street, he says, “Dorothy, my dear one. My only, only Dorothy.” How she returned from beyond the grave isn’t as hard to fathom as how Aaron escaped from Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.” Even die-hard fans of Tyler’s work should probably let this one float by.