"Digging to America": Strangers in an adopted land

"Digging to America"
by Anne Tyler
Knopf, 277 pp., $24.95

It may not be generally known that Anne Tyler's husband was Taghi Modarressi, a writer born and educated in Tehran whose career, after two beguiling novels, "The Book of Absent People" and "The Pilgrim's Rules of Etiquette," was cut criminally short by his death in 1997. Certainly you wouldn't guess Tyler's intimate Iranian connection from the content of her own novels.

Perhaps she felt Iran and Iranians were her husband's turf. Or maybe this most domestic of novelists felt uncomfortable entering territory that was so politically charged, given the rocky state of U.S.-Iranian relations over the past 30 years.

Whatever the case, Tyler has rarely drawn on her knowledge of Iran for material in her fiction — until now.

Her new novel, "Digging to America," focuses on two families. One is white-bread American (actually, make that whole-wheat-bread American). The other is Iranian-American.

The two families meet by chance in 1997 at Baltimore's airport, where they're waiting to greet the South Korean orphans they've adopted. Brad Donaldson and Bitsy Dickinson ("she had kept her maiden name") make a huge to-do of the occasion. The Yazdans, on the other hand, are all but invisible until their baby is carried off the plane.

When stridently social Bitsy insists on initiating a friendship with the Yazdans, young couple Sami and Ziba find her difficult to resist. Sami's widowed mother Maryam, however, is less malleable. She attends each "Arrival Party" that Bitsy and Ziba alternately throw for the two adoptees over the ensuing years. But she remains somewhat aloof.

Later, when Bitsy's father, now widowed himself, starts showing romantic interest in Maryam, relations between the two families get really tricky.

Several tasty ironies are at play in the book. Sami and Ziba look to Bitsy and Brad to be the all-American "Joneses" they hope to keep up with. But Bitsy is pushing a multicultural agenda and has little patience with the Yazdans' Americanization of their adoptive daughter.

Nor does she think much of Ziba working. Mothers, Bitsy believes, should stay home with their children.

Among the Iranian characters, other issues, viewed largely through Maryam's eyes, are at stake. Maryam has lost touch with most of her Iranian-American friends after 39 years in the U.S. One reason: "Politics had increasingly complicated matters. ... Who supported the Shah? Who did not?"

She also lacks the convert's enthusiasm for her adopted country. It was marriage rather than an immigrant's dream of America that brought her to Baltimore.

What's interesting here is the way Tyler acknowledges, then pulls her punches on these issues. Maryam will glance at the headlines, take them in, then turn her mind to other things. Her real drama, this late in life, stems from her realization that she'll always be an outsider.

Whether that's because she's Iranian or is simply inherent to her character, she isn't sure. She wasn't a good fit in her native Tehran either, she recalls. And how much does her self-containment have to do with the after-effects of bereavement, detailed with dry-eyed concision by Tyler?

Elegant, low-key, self-sufficient and tidily constrained in her habits of mind and conduct, Maryam feels little need for a social life — which makes Bitsy's cooked-up festivities and enthusiasm over a possible romance between her father and Maryam all the more awkward. The scenes where the two women's contrasting sensibilities come into conflict are wry, painful, pointed reading.

Elsewhere, the novel has its lapses. By the time the last "Arrival Party" rolls around, Tyler seems tired of the business herself and her writing becomes surprisingly perfunctory. There's also an ill-advised chapter-long experiment in which Donaldson- Dickinson family life is rendered in "childspeak" from the viewpoint of their adopted daughter.

Finally there's the question of Brad: How can he stand Bitsy? She may be good-hearted, but even her own father advises her to "give it a rest" when she's in party-planning overdrive. Several characters in the novel get chapters to themselves, depicting their background stories. Brad could have used one.

The best thing here is Maryam's Iranian-American cultural dislocation and the social ambivalence it induces in her — a subject clearly natural to Tyler, yet new to her fiction.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com.

He has been the Seattle Times book critic since 1998 and has published four novels.