Anne Tyler, Beginner’s Goodbye

Cecilia Donohue (Independent Scholar - North America)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2012

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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With her nineteenth novel,

The Beginner’s Goodbye

(2012), American writer Anne Tyler continues in the thematic vein of her more recent works, notably

Back When We Were Grownups

(2001),

The Amateur Marriage

(2004), and

Noah’s Compass

(2009), as she once again focuses on the cares and concerns of characters in midlife or older. At the same time, with this book Tyler breaks with her usual tradition of presenting an extensive cast of characters through third person narration. The comparatively sparsely populated

The Beginner’s Goodbye

is narrated in the first person by 35-year-old Aaron Woolcott, co-owner with his sister of a vanity publishing business, whose wife Dorothy, a physician eight years his senior, dies when a tree falls on their home. The novel takes place in Baltimore,…

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Citation: Donohue, Cecilia. "Beginner’s Goodbye". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 August 2012 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=34673, accessed 19 April 2024.]

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