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Books

A rich American blend

By VANESSA GEZARI
Published May 7, 2006

DIGGING TO AMERICA: A Novel

By Anne Tyler

Knopf, $24.95, 277 pp

Iranian-born Maryam Yazdan has been in the United States more than 30 years when her son and daughter-in-law decide to adopt a Korean baby. Standing in the Baltimore airport awaiting the infant's arrival, no one in the Yazdan family knows what to expect. But when Sooki is carried off the plane, Maryam finds herself inexplicably drawn to this foreign grandchild, whose name is quickly Americanized to Susan.

"Sometimes she imagined that Susan resembled her physically, even, but then she had to laugh at herself," Anne Tyler writes. "Still, something around the eyes, some way of looking at things, some onlooker's look: that was what they shared. Neither one of them quite belonged."

On the same night in the same airport, the Donaldson family is also meeting its adopted Korean baby for the first time. Big, boisterous and grating in ways that seem uniquely American, the Donaldsons are as outgoing as the Yazdans are reserved. Soon afterward, they invite the Iranian-American family to the first of what will be many parties celebrating their adopted daughters.

"I believe the girls should get to know each other, don't you?" Bitsy Donaldson asks Maryam. "So as to maintain their cultural heritage."

Digging to America, Tyler's 17th novel, is about boundaries and how we transcend them, entering each other's lands, cultures and hearts like flood water spreading across thresholds. That water moves regardless of man-made edges does not negate those edges so much as it indicates their limitations. In much the same way, Tyler suggests that differences of country and culture are no match for love, jealousy, frustration and ordinary dislike, yet those differences remain beneath the surface, troubling the waters that flow over them.

Unwaveringly complex and blessedly apolitical, the novel is also, as its title signals, a searching meditation on what it means to be American. Maryam Yazdan - private, dignified, old-world elegant - is the character who struggles most openly with competing wishes to belong and to retain her cultural "outsiderness." Yet it isn't clear what belonging means in a country where Korean babies are adopted off planes, Iranian-Americans sell real estate and a Chinese orphan is persuaded to relinquish her pacifiers by means of an extravagant party at which the "binkies" are tied to helium balloons and released into the stratosphere. Does anyone really belong in this America, where tradition is constantly giving way to invention? Do even the Donaldsons - so American in their well-meaning praise of Maryam's Middle Eastern cooking - belong?

Their praise rankles Maryam. When her daughter-in-law asks her to invite the Donaldsons to an Iranian feast, she feels "an inner pinch of resistance. Why should they have to put on these ethnic demonstrations? Let the Donaldsons go to the Smithsonian for that! she thought peevishly. Let them read National Geographic!"

Yet Maryam is distinctive. Perhaps the most un-American thing about her is, as the Donaldson widower who falls in love with her notes, that "she's a woman with boundaries." In a country where demarcations are constantly bypassed, where people from all over the world find themselves suddenly related to one another, Maryam's self-contained manner makes her seem distant and aloof. Her own relatives condemn her coolness, but they miss her inner struggle, the way she agonizes over her own hesitancy, her unwillingness to connect. Ultimately, just growing older seems to Maryam like a series of leave-takings, suggesting the boundaries we all cross in time, regardless of where we come from.

Beginning when the Korean-born babies are 1, the Yazdans and Donaldsons throw parties to celebrate the anniversary of their arrival in America. The parties are the Donaldsons' idea, but the Yazdans happily join in. At the first one, there's a big sheet cake iced like an American flag; later, the cake becomes a platter of baklava stuck with tiny American flags. At the final Arrival Party, the Yazdans serve sushi.

This, Digging to America suggests, is the way we are tending: toward a more total immersion in each other's lives and, by extension, each other's cultures. Tyler's characters misunderstand one another but, finally, need each other. Her insights frustrate any lazy reading of the American immigrant experience. The only thing you can be sure of is that it's more complicated than you think.

Vanessa Gezari is a Times staff writer.

[Last modified May 7, 2006, 09:28:18]