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

The opening line of Anne Tyler’s 19th novel is self-consciously clever: “The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how other people reacted.” For a few pages, “The Beginner’s Goodbye” sounds like the sort of droll story Jose Saramago might write if he lived in Baltimore. But Tyler drops the spectral comedy almost immediately and returns to Earth with another wry tale of mournful folks with quirky occupations. In other words, it’s like the ghost of an Anne Tyler novel — a little immaterial but with enough residual matter to remind us of what we love about her books in the flesh.

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