The Beginner's Goodbye
by Anne Tyler
- Percentage of approved critics who have given this book a positive review.
Critic Rating
55%
Critic Reviews: 55
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- User rating from iDreamBooks & iTunes
Reader Rating
80%
Reader Ratings: 376
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Synopsis
Anne Tyler gives us a wise, haunting, and deeply moving new novel in which she explores how a middle-aged man, ripped apart by the death of his wife, is gradually restored by her frequent appearances-in their house, on the roadway, in the market. Crippled in his right arm and leg, Aaron spent his childhood fending off a sister who wants to manage him. So when he meets Dorothy, a plain, outspoken, self-dependent young woman, she is like a breath of fresh air.... more
About Anne Tyler
- All Critics: 55
- Positive: 32
- Negative: 23
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The Guardian | 20 Apr 2012
...The Beginner's Goodbye – a small first step in the long process of recovery from the death of a spouse – is artistically subtle and emotionally satisfying despite its lightness.
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The Telegraph | 19 Apr 2012
This palliates his pain and makes an acute and amusing novel seem bogus. Tyler has become an unthinking man’s Alice Munro.
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The Independent | 29 Apr 2012
My only complaint? At 198 pages and with fairly big type, I would have loved it to be longer. But maybe I'm just saying that I didn't want it to end. Which is also a fairly common Tyler thing.
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Publishers Weekly | 30 Jan 2012
This is no gothic ghost story nor chronicle of a man unraveling in his grief, but rather an uplifting tale of love and forgiveness.
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The New York Times | 5 Apr 2012
It’s a trite and predictable lesson from what is arguably this talented author’s tritest and most predictable novel.
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The New York Times | 4 May 2012
Call me heartless, but I found Aaron’s suffering too muted to make his resurrection cathartic or even credible.
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Los Angeles Times | 2 Apr 2012
It's classic Tyler...with characters who have dug themselves so deep into their emotional caves that they don't realize how small the space is, and dark, until an avalanche removes the back wall.
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Tampa Bay Times | 8 Apr 2012
Despite the emotional weight of her subject matter, she treats it with a delicate hand, building the story not with melodrama but with quotidian details that ring true...
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AV Club | 9 Apr 2012
But for all its grace notes, the novel is too slight and uneven to survive its final pages, when Tyler wraps everything up too neatly. She diminishes the best parts of her book...
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Literary Treats | 24 Apr 2012
Tyler’s simple, straightforward narrative style keeps her story from ever becoming maudlin
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The Globe and Mail | 6 May 2012
It is cozy to the point of bafflement. It is as if we are stuck in a time warp.
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Oregon Live | 28 Apr 2012
Tyler, widowed in 1995, has allowed enough time to pass to write successfully about loss and recovery without being pedantic or mawkish in doing so.
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Roux Morgue | 18 Apr 2012
...The Beginner's Goodbye felt unfinished and unrealized, and worse, a retread.
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The Washington Post | 27 Mar 2012
...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.
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The BookPage | 11 Apr 2012
I would call it minimalist were it not for the thump of magical realism. . .
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Book Reporter | 4 May 2012
Fans of Tyler’s work will find THE BEGINNER’S GOODBYE to be a slight departure from her previous offerings, but a pleasant addition to her long list of popular novels.
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Entertainment Weekly | 4 Apr 2012
Aaron is Tyler's beginner, a man crippled in more ways than one. But her portrayal of his pain and clumsy resilience is beautifully intricate.
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Literary Review
The effect of the book's restricted canvas is to sacrifice the comic ebullience of such novels as The Accidental Tourist or A Patchwork Planet to a quieter realism, in a carefully observed study of grief...
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BookPage
This glimpse into personal loss limned with an unexpectedly bright future will be welcomed by Tyler's many admirers.
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The National | 30 Mar 2012
Indeed, the title is perfect. This is a guide to mourning and letting go, and a far better one than poor Woolcott Publishing could ever produce.
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St. Louis Today | 14 Apr 2012
Now comes No. 19, "The Beginner's Goodbye," a novel no less riveting and engaging than those that preceded it.
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Richmond Times-Dispatch | 8 Apr 2012
But Tyler, with subtlety and compassion, leaves that issue to the reader, and in so doing examines the eternal issues of sorrow and loss — and life's blessings.
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Bluestalking | 11 Apr 2012
Not really a great sign when the cover blurb's better than the book.
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Christian Science Monitor
“The Beginner's Goodbye” isn't up there with, say, “Saint Maybe,” still my favorite of her books.
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The Miami Herald | 15 Apr 2012
It is enough for Aaron, but too hastily dispensed to be enough for the reader.
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truthdig | 27 Apr 2012
If I have criticisms about the book they stem from the fact that the first sentence is so alluring, the rest of the novel is hard-pressed to live up to it.
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Journal Sentinel | 31 Mar 2012
Tyler's treatment of Aaron's marriage is as dead as Dorothy herself. . .
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Seattle Times | 1 Apr 2012
One might say that both he and Nandina become intermediates, rather than beginners, in the game of life, as rendered faultlessly, entertainingly and entirely believably by Anne Tyler.
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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | 8 Apr 2012
Ms. Tyler's powers of description are as sharp as ever.
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Cleveland.com | 4 Apr 2012
Even as a ghost, Dorothy failed to engage me, much less haunt me.
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San Francisco Chronicle | 8 Apr 2012
There are some stylistic hiccups. . . and Tyler telegraphs the ending from a mile away.
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The Columbus Dispatch | 15 Apr 2012
Tyler’s writing is elegant and wry, and the novel is just the right length for its subject.
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Book Geeks | 17 Apr 2012
This book has a great deal of heart to it.
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RabbitReader | 6 May 2012
If you have never read Anne Tyler...The Beginner’s Goodbye would be a wonderful introduction to this award-winning novelist.
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Kirkus Reviews | 15 Feb 2012
Some might consider the latest from Tyler . . .typically wise and charming, while others will dismiss it as cloying.
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pbpulse.com | 13 Apr 2012
She remains a graceful novelist, extremely skilled at observation of a particular kind of constipated life. But then, she ought to be; she’s written this book about 10 times.
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Harbor Light | 25 Apr 2012
I finished the story without a struggle but didn’t feel as satisfied as I had with some of her other novels.
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BuffaloNews.com | 29 Apr 2012
In this her 19th novel, Tyler has crafted an unusual and perfect jewel of a love story.
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Boston.com | 1 Apr 2012
...rich and unexpected insights in an absolute charmer of a novel about grief, healing, and the transcendent power of love.
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The New York Times | 4 May 2012
I admire Tyler’s loyalty and benevolence toward her characters, but in “The Beginner’s Goodbye” her lovingly constructed cosmos is in danger of becoming a snow globe: a hermetically sealed community in which the greatest peril is being caught in an artificial blizzard.
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The New Zealand Herald | 20 Jun 2012
Small as it is, and simple on a superficial level, this is one of the best books I've read about death and loss.
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Literary Treats | 24 Apr 2012
Anne Tyler’s The Beginner’s Goodbye is a moving, beautifully written portrait of grief, a story of loss and the desire to put off the goodbye as long as possible.
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The Telegraph | 4 Apr 2012
...ordinary lives can contain moments of great beauty, dignity and hope. The Beginner’s Goodbye has all three.
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The Independent | 6 Apr 2012
Holding a mirror to her characters' attempts to deal with their own grief and the grief of others, Tyler uses simple, elegant prose to manifest her particular brands of realism and humour.
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The Globe and Mail | 7 May 2012
But when, near the end, Aaron announces, “I wanted the jolts and jogs of ordinary life. I wanted realness, even if it was flawed and pockmarked,” I know just how he feels.
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San Francisco Chronicle | 8 Apr 2012
The Beginner's Goodbye is the purest distillation of an Anne Tyler novel imaginable...what redeems the novel is Tyler's typically brilliant use of details.
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Tony's Book World | 15 Apr 2012
Tyler’s new novel, “The Beginner’s Goodbye” follows that same pattern of introducing eccentric characters, but this time it felt to me like she crossed the line into contrivance.
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Bookmunch | 10 Apr 2012
This is a compassionate exploration of loss as one of the defining experiences of life since, as Aaron comments, people who have not lost a loved one strike him as ‘not quite grown up’.
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New Zealand Listener | 26 May 2012
Tyler is good on grief but this beginner’s guide, it must be said, lacks the richness, the wryness, the comic and the tragic notes of her best work.
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Nomad Reader | 16 Mar 2012
She united many seemingly disparate classic novel traits in this short novel, but it didn't feel whole to me, despite my enjoyment of so many of its parts.
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Bibliophile By the Sea | 7 Mar 2012
...the story left me with a lot to think about, and the ending ultimately left me smiling. Highly Recommended - I Loved it!
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It's Either Sadness or Euphoria | 6 Apr 2012
Anne Tyler is back to fighting form with her bittersweet, charming new book about love, loss, and coming to terms with reality in relationships.
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Readings | 23 Apr 2012
This heartbreaking story is imbued with beauty and bittersweet melancholy but, this being an Anne Tyler novel, it is spiked with a sly sense of humour and wisdom.
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NPR | 4 Apr 2012
In The Beginner's Goodbye, Tyler again celebrates not experts but amateurs and novices — beginners still capable of learning. It's this capacity for change that makes Tyler's characters so sympathetic, and her books so satisfying.
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