Anne Tyler Digging to America

I just finished reading a wonderful, luminous book by Anne Tyler, titled Digging to America. It is about two families, the Yazdans, an Iranian family and the Donaldsons, an American family. They meet at Baltimore airport, waiting for their adopted daughters from Korea to arrive.

Powell's summarizes it here.

Bitsy Donaldson impulsively invites the Yazdans to celebrate with an "arrival party," an event that is repeated every year as the two families become more deeply intertwined.
Even independent-minded Maryam is drawn in. But only up to a point. When she finds herself being courted by one of the Donaldson clan, a good-hearted man of her vintage, recently widowed and still recovering from his wife's death, suddenly all the values she cherishes — her traditions, her privacy, her otherness — are threatened. Somehow this big American takes up so much space that the orderly boundaries of her life feel invaded.

It was amazing how Anne Tyler was able to capture the lives of Iranians living in America, what it feels like to be foreign. She is also able to understand the complexities of being mainstream American and the contradictions that entails. The novel was about daily life, without too much happening, other than the adoptions, family celebrations, disease, death and loneliness.

Bookworld felt the seminal theme was belonging.

Her overarching theme in the book is belonging and fitting in, both in terms of nationality, ethnicity and on a purely personal level, fitting into a community of friends and family.

The pleasure of the book comes from watching realistic seeming characters navigate realistic seeming lives. The paternal grandmother on the Yazdan side, Maryam, a proud, quiet, seemingly aloof woman, and Bitsy Donaldson the more organic-than-thou adoptive mother who weaves her own dresses, are by far the strongest characters though all are well done and I felt that Tyler really loved these characters, despite or perhaps because of, their flaws and frailties.

CS monitors examines the political aspects of the novel.

Maryam is especially critical of Americans. Tyler notes incisively, "She had not been one of those Iranians who viewed America as the Promised Land. To her and her university friends, the US was the great disappointer," the nation that championed democracy yet backed the Shah.

Maryam finds Americans overwhelming in their energy and bluster. She is tired of being asked whether her family "had run into any unpleasantness during the Iranian hostage crisis" or after 9/11 (they had). Her resentment extends, rather unreasonably, to American interest in her culture: "Why should they [the Yazdans] have to put on these ethnic demonstrations? Let the Donaldsons go to the Smithsonian for that! she thought peevishly."

Although her son, Sami, was born in the US, he, too, spins riffs mocking Americans. Tyler softens the Yazdans' criticisms of Americans with the irony that they are also outsiders in their native Iranian culture. As Maryam comes to realize, "She had never felt at home in her own country or anywhere else."

The relationship between overbearing, but well-meaning, politically correct Bitsy Dickinson-Donaldson and glamorous but insecure Ziba yields a rich crop of Tyler's trademark sly social commentary. Bitsy has a knack for making Ziba feel bad, whether about feeding Susan lactose-laden milk or leaving her two days a week (with Maryam!) while she works. Unlike the Yazdans, the Donaldsons call their daughter by her given name, Jin-Ho, dress her in Korean clothes, and opt for public school.
Bitsy loves to create traditions, most notably the annual Arrival Day party, complete with a ritual screening of the video of the girls arriving at the airport. The families trade off hosting these extravaganzas, at which Maryam is thrown together with Bitsy's widowed, overly friendly father.

Women play a central role in this story, and the relationships they weave with each other and with them men in the novel are exquisitely detailed.