A Slipping-Down Life

1969, 1971 Bantam edition
Anne Tyler
A Slipping-Down Life
Original price 95 cents, purchase price 50 cents
Very worn paperback
C+

Tyler's third novel tells of Evie, an overweight 17-year-old girl who carves the last name of a local rock singer into her own forehead (or had it carved by another girl, if we're to believe the final revelation), and then later marries him.  He has just about no redeeming features, but the marriage doesn't break up until, within 24 hours, her father dies and her husband cheats on her.  She's three months pregnant but he doesn't want to move out of their tar-paper shack into her father's house.  She's got a part-time job at a library and her life will probably stop slipping down.

Tyler still hasn't found herself as a writer, but this is an improvement over her mid-'60s books.  The setting is still the North Carolina of her youth, but a less isolated town than in If Morning and Tin Can Tree.  The characters are about as good as in the former, but the plot is better.  There are more topical references than in the earlier stories, because of the music plot, although the Monkees were already passe by '69, so the setting may be '66 to '68 instead of the then current year.

This novel was made into a Lili Taylor movie, which I just heard of a few minutes ago.