Vinegar Girl

Anne Tyler

Hogarth Shakespeare, £16.99

Review by Alan Taylor

ANNE Tyler’s 21st novel is a modern retelling of William Shakespeare’s comic play, The Taming of the Shrew, which was commissioned by her publisher to commemorate the Bard’s 400th anniversary. Others in the series include Margaret Atwood’s version of The Tempest, Howard Jacobsen’s of The Merchant of Venice and Gillian Flynn’s take on Hamlet. There is, of course, nothing new in this kind of enterprise. Not so long ago HarperCollins inaugurated the Austen Project whereby the likes of Val McDermid, Joanna Trollope, Alexander McCall Smith and Curtis Sittenfeld were given an Austen novel to play with, the results of which did not always meet with the approval of more militant fans of the originals.

In general the Janeites’ ire focussed on plot which, of course, is to miss the point, for it is Austen’s style that has assured her legacy. Needless to say, this is nigh impossible to mimic and sustain over the course of a novel and none of her successors made any attempt to do so. The same is even more true of Shakespeare whose genius lies in his unique way of saying and his reinvention of the English language. On the other hand, his plots are often no more plausible or less ludicrous than those of a tea-time soap opera. Indeed, many of them, like The Taming of the Shrew, were not invented by him but borrowed from mythology and folk tales.

In it, the eponymous Shrew, Katherine ‘Kate’ Minola of Padua, forges a marriage of convenience to well-born and wealthy Petruccio of Verona who makes it his task to tame her, as if she were a bucking bronco. As told by Shakespeare, the story is about subservience and power, of male dread of dominant and mouthy females, and the Renaissance fear of women in domestic rebellion. In the 1960s it was filmed with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as the warring couple. Marketed as “a motion picture for every man who ever gave the back of his hand to his beloved...and for every woman who deserved it”, it was judged a success, not least perhaps because Franco Zefferelli, the director, followed Shakespeare’s lead and allowed the shrew to control her husband while appearing to obey him.

Above all, though, The Taming of the Shrew is an intensely erotic play and when performed properly it ought to crackle with sexual energy. None of this is to be found in Tyler’s Vinegar Girl which has about as much kick as a milk shake. This is odd and disappointing because in the past, in novels such as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist and, last year, A Spool of Blue Thread, she has demonstrated what an acute and tart observer she is of the family lives of her fellow Americans. Home to Tyler can be both a refuge and a prison. “In her darker mode,” John Updike once reflected, she “celebrates domestic claustrophobia and private stagnation.”

Darkness, however, is not the prevailing mood here. Instead, Tyler has opted to accentuate the humour and temper the acidity. Her heroine, if such she may be termed, is Kate Battista, a 29-year-old classroom assistant. She lives with her father, a nutty scientist, and her 15-year-old sister, Bunny, who is a borderline normal teenager beginning to show a healthy interest in the opposite sex. Kate has taken over the role in the household of her dead mother. She cooks – albeit a limited repertoire of dishes – cleans, tends the garden, attempts to keep tabs on her sister, and panders to her father’s whims. At Charles Village Little People’s School, she gets on better with the children than she does with the staff. Her nemesis is Mrs Darling, the head teacher, who would like Kate – a blunt speaker – to exercise “tact”, “restraint” and “diplomacy” in her dealings with parents and their offspring. Kate’s response is to ponder the overlapping meanings of these words. “People,” she thinks, “tended to be very spendthrift with their words...”

Key to Vinegar Girl’s plot is Pyotr Cherbakov, her father’s apparently brilliant Russian lab assistant. His three-year visa is soon coming to an end and he must leave the US if he cannot get a Green Card. Dr Battista is bereft at the thought of losing him, especially as he believes he is on the cusp of a breakthrough with his research, and decides that the best way to hold on to him is for Kate to marry him. Yes, this is the squeaking hinge on which this tiresome farce rests. At first Kate resists but, inevitably, predictably, she succumbs and a wedding date is set. We are now firmly mired in a rom-com bog and one could easily imagine Hugh Grant being wheeled out to play Pyotr who specialises in reciting nonsensical proverbs like “beware against sweet persons for sugar has no nutrition” and mangling his English. What larks!

According to the blurb writer Kate is “a throughly modern, independent woman”. We must have read different novels. No “thoroughly modern, independent woman” would for a moment go along with what Kate does. She is won round to her father’s point of view all too easily and, inevitably, we move towards the kind of neat resolution that will have more cynical – and savvy –readers thrusting a finger down their throat. For we are meant to accept that the same woman who has such a waspish tongue – “Fine, let her die of scurvy,” is her response when Bunny, a recent convert to vegetarianism, asserts that potato chips are her meal-time vegetable – is content to marry to someone she hardly knows and who, if he gets a chance, will boss her around.

It is hard, moreover, to believe we are in Baltimore, where Tyler lives and where most of her work is set. You can even take a tour of that benighted city that takes in various landmarks mentioned in her novels. Suffice it to say that this is not the Baltimore of Stringer Bell and The Wire. Tyler’s terrain is that of a small, well-to-do, well-ordered town within a big, bruised and bruising city. Her characters don’t do drugs, let alone deal in them, and their neighbourhoods are unlikely to be ghettos in which spaced-out rappers dressed in over-sized baseball shorts loaf around outdoors on sofas that are losing their stuffing. No one in Tylerland carries a gun and black people are conspicuous by their non-appearance.

It is worth noting, however, that there is undoubtedly an autobiographical element to Vinegar Girl. Tyler herself married a political refugee, a psychiatrist who fled Iran when he was 25, and her depiction of the likable Pyotr may owe something to him. Likewise, when Kate muses, “Immigration was the family’s new bugaboo”, one senses that the family referred to is bigger than the one of which Dr Battista is paterfamilias. Immigration is present-day America’s bugaboo as it is ours. If – when? – Donald Trump becomes president and attempts to bully Mexico into building a wall and keeps his promise to stop Muslims from entering the US, the challenge for talented novelists such Anne Tyler will not be which Shakespeare play to adapt but to tell us stories about how that came to pass and what our response to it might be.