The response to Breathing Lessons is overwhelmingly one of surprise. There is no poetry, no plot twist, no grand message - but the book manages to be hugely entertaining. Dan Crawford describes it as “surprisingly enjoyable” and that sums it up for me, too.

How does Anne Tyler do it? The one big gag involves a coupon for shampoo. Maggie lets an old friend use it to jot down some song lyrics but she wants it back. Towards the end of the book she hands it to the boy at the supermarket check-out, who thinks that she has handed him a message; the lyric on the coupon runs “Hold me close”.

This is probably one of the weakest plot devices I have ever read but, because we understand Maggie, it represents a lovely, private moment. Breathing Lessons is all about reality killing dreams. There is no conventionally happy ending, but Maggie remains upbeat and so we admire her.

Star letter

I found Ira the more sympathetic character, both because of his thwarted ambitions and for having to put up with Maggie. Like Alyson Rudd, I first had doubts about spending a whole book in her company. However, I began to admire her determination to do what she felt was right — to fix her son’s marriage. She simply feels that if she makes the smallest adjustment to reality, everything will settle perfectly into place. I think Maggie believes she has a good marriage; if she believes that “bickering” is “compiling two views of things”, perhaps she is right. Certainly there is much evidence of tolerance and understanding. Whether the reader takes sides or not, one cannot deny that Anne Tyler elicits a strong emotional response.

Jean Marshall, Bushey, Hertfordshire

March 7, 2008

A marriage seen through the eyes of both partners endures some testing times. The tale had just enough conviction for Alyson Rudd. Do you agree? Post your comments

ANNE TYLER'S Breathing Lessons will stand or fall at book clubs depending on whether the members think she captured some basic truths about marriage. The novel is about Maggie and Ira Moran and the tiring, seemingly endless day they spend travelling to a funeral and their attempt to patch up their relationship with their granddaughter.

Like any married couple, the Morans bicker about each other's stream of annoying habits. But without becoming saccharine, Tyler depicts a solid, reliable and loving relationship.

“What are we two going to live for, all the rest of our lives?” Maggie asks. But by now the reader knows that they will live for their marriage. As in many relationships the wife is the chatterbox, the husband is more reflective. Maggie is impulsive - in fact this trait defines her almost completely - while Ira is quiet and by turns perplexed or resigned.

Maggie vocalises her thoughts and emotions but Ira internalises them, leaving Maggie to guess what he is thinking by the tunes he whistles.

Maggie's problem is that she has so much love to give Leroy, her granddaughter, but no opportunity to show it. Ira's problem is that he has had to compromise. He dreamt of becoming a doctor but had to take over his father's framing business instead.

Just when you think the novel is becoming one-sided, Tyler shifts the perspective and we glimpse Maggie through the eyes of her husband. Ira wonders how much emotion and time Maggie wastes. Why does she rummage through her handbag again when she already knows its precise contents?

One of the triumphs of Breathing Lessons is that the reader does not take sides. Certainly there are moments when Maggie is exasperating and Ira seems sullen. But Tyler explains their foibles so neatly that it is impossible to blame one more than the other for all that goes wrong. There is just enough sexual chemistry and humour between them for the marriage to be strong, and any book group would be likely to end up agreeing that they are the crucial ingredients for a successful marriage.

The rules of the road in American fiction

Maggie Moran, the domestic heroine of Breathing Lessons, has a crisis of confidence when her teenage daughter asks: “Mom? Was there a certain conscious point in your life when you decided to settle for being ordinary?” It is a question that haunts both Maggie and her husband as they drive from Baltimore to Pennsylvania - that sense of lost potential, of playing by the rules and ending up in a life devoid of consequence. The book's landscape reflects this mood: its America seems a boring superhighway of oversized trucks, junk-food outlets and quiet desperation.

But the American road always promised so much more. If modern American literature began with Huckleberry Finn, then the Mississippi River was the country's first highway, trafficking a new galaxy of goods, peoples and possibilities. As Huck and the runaway slave Jim dash for freedom, Mark Twain's story also implies that escape is possible from society's deadening influence.

Jack Kerouac's On the Road builds on this powerful myth, locating the “true” America on the road itself, where “beats” - those who inhabit the margins of society - are on the move. Street prophets and transcendent visions are everywhere in Kerouac's cross-country tales of underground culture.

While Kerouac sang the joys of the combustible engine, he was also a fervent technophobe who believed that industrial progress would ultimately destroy the world. This is the premise of a recent American novel: Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in which father and son travel down a post- apocalyptic American highway pushing a decayed shopping trolley and fighting for survival. The characters they meet are more than just colourful, usually they are savage, murderous predators. Given the times we live in, the technological holocaust presented is as chilling as it is convincing.

Perhaps mild disappointment in life is not the worst of fates.

NICHOLAS PIERPAN

February 22, 2008

Irritating, pitiable and ultimately uplifting. One day in an American marriage. Read the book and tell us what you think

BREATHING LESSONS is one of those novels that needs a reputation behind it. It covers a day in the life of Maggie Moran, of Baltimore, and I was not at all sure I wanted to spend a whole book in the company of Maggie.

She sets the alarm wrong on the day of the funeral of her best friend's husband and crashes her newly repaired car as she drives out of the body shop. Her tights keep falling down and she is snobbish about the name given to her granddaughter.

But the book, and Maggie, grew on me. I found her irritating, then sweet, then interfering, then pitiable, then strong. She works, often selflessly, at a nursing home, and is married to Ira, who sometimes seems to be a saint in the way he quietly copes with her scatterbrain plans to fix her son's marriage. Ira and Maggie drive to the funeral, which is an eccentric affair that brings together their old friends from high school. Maggie is distracted, though - she is worried that Fiona, her former daughter-in-law, is about to remarry and plans a detour on the way back from the funeral to visit Fiona and Leroy, the grandchild they have not seen for years. It is all perfectly executed by Tyler. Breathing Lessons requires patience but it is worth it for a masterly and moving depiction of an ordinary American marriage.

Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

Vintage, £7.99; 336pp

Thanks to Vintage, we have ten free copies of Breathing Lessons to give away. E-mail your group's name and address to books@thetimes.co.uk

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