Looking for A Second Chance

By Paul Gray

SAINT MAYBE by Anne Tyler; Knopf; 337 pages; $22

Anne Tyler's literary career has been as pleasurable to watch as her books have been to read. Both the process and the products exhibit an organic symmetry. Tyler seems to have known what she wanted to do from the beginning and then to have got better and better at doing it.

Her early novels, such as If Morning Ever Comes (1964) and A Slipping-Down Life (1970), started small; they meticulously but fluidly recorded the perceptions of individual protagonists, usually young and female, adjusting to the outside world, most often represented by Baltimore and environs, where Tyler has spent much of her adult life. By the time of Earthly Possessions (1977) and Morgan's Passing (1980), Tyler's fiction had noticeably broadened and deepened; the cast of characters had grown more diverse, and the lives led by her people had assumed unmistakable moral dimensions. Then came the three novels that won her wide and deserved readership -- Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985) and the Pulitzer- prizewinning Breathing Lessons (1988) -- in which the seams between the joy and pain, the comedy and tragedy of everyday existence became impossible to distinguish.

Saint Maybe, Tyler's 12th novel, fits neatly and logically into this progression. It draws on the strengths of its predecessors -- e.g., the riotous domesticity of Morgan's Passing and the painful loss at the heart of The Accidental Tourist -- while investigating more thoroughly than Tyler has ever attempted before the sources and aftereffects of religious faith.

The story begins calmly enough, on a short, shady street in Baltimore in the mid-1960s. There live Doug and Dee Bedloe, he a high school math teacher, she a homemaker. Their eldest child, Claudia, has dropped out of college to marry and bear a succession of babies; Danny, the middle Bedloe, has graduated from high school and now works at the post office; Ian, the youngest, is in the 11th grade and a promising pitcher on the baseball team. "There was this about the Bedloes," Tyler writes. "They believed that every part of their lives was absolutely wonderful. It wasn't just an act, either. They really did believe it."

Then Danny brings home Lucy Dean, whom he met at work when she arrived at his window to mail a bowling ball and other possessions to her former husband, now living in Wyoming. The prospect of a daughter-in-law who is both a divorcee and the mother of two small children, Agatha and Thomas, does not thrill the elder Bedloes, but a courtship of only a few weeks is followed by a wedding and then, seven months later, the birth of an obviously full-term baby girl. Ian does not believe the child is Danny's; roped into baby-sitting duties so that Lucy can get out once in a while, he begins to think she is being unfaithful to his brother during her excursions. At a moment of great vexation, he confides his suspicions to Danny. This leads first to one tragic event, then to another. Ian incurs a guilt that is beyond the power of reason or common sense to assuage.

Miserably sleepwalking through his freshman year in college, Ian returns to Baltimore and passes a storefront bearing the legend CHURCH OF THE SECOND CHANCE. He hears singing and is drawn inside; only a second chance will save him. Members of the congregation are invited to rise and ask for prayers for whatever is troubling them. Ian stands: "Pray for me to be good again. Pray for me to be forgiven." But he is not forgiven, the minister cheerfully tells Ian after the service: "Jesus remembers how difficult life on earth can be. He helps with what you can't undo. But only after you've tried to undo it."

The burden of Saint Maybe records Ian's attempts to atone for the blunder that has become a millstone on his young life. Since crime is ordinarily more interesting than punishment, Tyler's emphasis on her hero's long reparation is both risky and audacious. The more dedicated Ian becomes to religion and self- sacrifice, the further he diverges from the alert, sexually aware, engrossing young man he seems on the opening pages. Ian, in short, turns into a stick-in-the-mud.

Tyler largely salvages this problem by focusing on the mud -- the rich, roiling life that surrounds her ascetic main character. Ian's parents age interestingly and erratically. His ever optimistic mother suddenly bursts out to his long-suffering father, "We've had such extraordinary troubles, and somehow they've turned us ordinary. That's what's so hard to figure. We're not a special family anymore." The three children whom Ian dropped out of college to help raise and support grow up loving but also embarrassed by him on numerous occasions, including the one on which he mentions God at the dinner table in front of a favorite teacher whom the children have invited over in the hope that she will fall in love with and marry him.

This extraneous, frenetic activity cannot fully disguise a hollow at the center of the novel: Ian, Saint Maybe, finally becomes too good to be believed. But before the book is over, most of the people who figure prominently in it have had a say, an opportunity for some event to be recorded as they saw it happen: frightened children, inquisitive adolescents, disillusioned adults, weary oldsters. The pleasure of reading Anne Tyler lies in listening to these disparate people, watching out for the odd impressions that creep into the margins of their tales. Seen this way, the moral message of Saint Maybe oddly resembles a medieval tapestry: at the center is an event of allegorical significance, but off to one corner is a cat, stealing -- and then regurgitating -- an oyster at a family Christmas dinner.