Vintage Books Reading Group Guides: Ladder of Years

Ladder of Years

by Anne Tyler

$24.00
336 pages
0-679-44155-7

About this guide
The questions for discussion, author statement, and suggested reading that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years. We hope they will provide you with a number of ways of looking at a novel which is alternately tragic, comic, and ironic.
Delia Grinstead is forty years old, sad, and tired. The recent loss of her father has brought to the surface her fears of other, impending losses as she faces her husband's mortality and her children's new independence. Delia's routine as a hardworking wife and mother is suddenly upset by a romantic interlude with a handsome stranger ten years her junior. This leads to a new look at her family and, finally, a reassessment of her life; soon afterwards, on a family holiday at the beach, Delia does what so many have secretly dreamed of doing: she impulsively walks away and takes on a new identity in a new town. She is led into strange emotional territory as she discovers over the course of more than a year a Delia Grinstead as yet unknown to her. Her bid for independence and her efforts to understand herself and her family constitute a circular journey home, but at the end of the novel Delia is dramatically changed.

For discussion

Why does Tyler begin her novel with the newspaper clipping describing Delia's disappearance? What does the clipping say about Delia? About her family? Do you feel that it sets a tone of anti-realism or fantasy? If so, does Tyler maintain or depart from this tone in the novel itself?

In your opinion, is it the loss of Delia's father that precipitates Delia's flight? What role does grief play in the novel? Is Delia ever able to fully acknowledge or understand her grief? How does her grief over the loss of her father extend to grief for her children, her husband, even herself?

What are Delia's real feelings toward Adrian, and what role does he play in her life? What about Rosemary, or rather Delia's perception of her? In what way does Delia identify with Rosemary, and how do Rosemary's actions and aura influence her?

How does "Miss Grinstead" differ from Mrs. Grinstead, the doctor's wife? How does Delia's change in dress and manner represent a change in the person Delia would like to be? How do others respond to Mrs. Grinstead? How do they respond to Miss Grinstead? To what extent have the two personas been molded consciously by Delia, and to what extent are they formed in response to the way others need to perceive her? "She seemed to have changed into someone else-a woman people looked to automatically for sustenance" [p. 183]. Is this what she originally sought from her new identity?

Delia has always been an avid reader of romance fiction, but during her time at Bay Borough she expands her literary horizons. What books does Delia read during the course of the story? How do the books she chooses to read reflect upon the events in her life? How might they affect her actions?

Compare the starkness of Delia's early months in Bay Borough with the fullness of her Baltimore existence. Why does she so passionately wish for this starkness? Why does it turn out to be so difficult to maintain? "She had always known that her body was just a shell she lived in, but it occurred to her now that her mind was yet another shell--in which case, who was 'she'?" [pp. 126-27]. Does she ever find the answer to this question?

Several of the women characters in Ladder of Years run away from the men in their lives. Compare the different situations of Delia, Ellie, Rosemary, Veronica, and Susie. What prompts each of them to escape? How do they cope with their feelings of ambivalence about the men they leave? What is Tyler trying to achieve by juxtaposing these similar, but distinct, stories?

Do you think Tyler delivers a feminist message in this novel, or is such a classification too simple? Would any of her women characters describe themselves as feminists?

Ellie says, "Funny how men always worry ahead of time that marriage might confine them. Women don't give it a thought. It's afterwards it hits them. Stuck for life! Imprisoned!" [p. 228]. Many of Tyler's women see marriage as a kind of imprisonment. Does this view outweigh the benefits and the joys of marriage? How does each of Tyler's women resolve "the wish to fly and the wish to stay earthbound"? If possible, refer to other Anne Tyler novels you might have read.

Why is Delia so vehement about not remembering her mother? Does it seem to you that Delia harbors feelings of having been deserted by her mother? What relation might such feelings have to her own actions, and to the way she deals with her children?

Does the Grinstead children's treatment of their mother constitute normal adolescent behavior, or is Delia correct in feeling rejected and scorned by them? After Carroll's visit, she recognizes that "not only had she lost her central importance to them but they, in fact, had become just a bit less overwhelmingly all-important to her," and she wonders "how long ago she had first begun to know that" [p. 211]. Could this unacknowledged truth have triggered the crisis in Delia's life?

Like the hero of a fairy tale, Sam makes his choice between three daughters and chooses the youngest. What other fairy-tale elements are incorporated into this story? Can you spot themes from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and other tales of fantasy? What purpose does Tyler serve by introducing these elements? What is it about Bay Borough that seems enchanted or imaginary?

What does Joel Miller's obsession with language signify? What are Joel's methods of coping with grief and loss? How do they differ from Sam's? Is Joel himself significantly different from Sam? Does the decision to be with Joel or Sam represent a real choice for Delia, or has she merely found in Joel a man who is in effect only another version of her own husband?

An entirely different novel might be written from Sam's point of view rather than from Delia's. Just as Sam's and Delia's memories of their first meeting diverge, so would their versions of Delia's disappearance. Can you give Sam's side of the story? What moments and incidents of the story might be the most meaningful to him? Do you finally feel that Tyler portrays him sympathetically?

One way of looking at Ladder of Years is to see it as an exploration of the darker and more destructive side of an apple-pie American family. Nat uses the C. R. Savage photograph as a metaphor for the idealized image of family as it diverges from the all-too-imperfect reality. Where else in the novel does Tyler prick her characters', and her readers', idealism about family life?

Do you find the ending happy or depressing? In Delia's place, what choice would you have made? Is her return to her family an act of love, or a capitulation?

In all of her works Anne Tyler has displayed a keen awareness of life's long cycle: birth, maturity, marriage, aging, and death. How does this awareness manifest itself in Ladder of Years? How does human life, as illustrated by the major and minor characters in the novel, take on a cyclical pattern?

Delia is bemused by the time-travel enthusiasts who subscribe to Adrian's newsletter, but after her return to her family at the end of the book she realizes that she herself has been on a "time trip" [p. 326]. In what way has Delia's journey been a time trip, and why has such a trip been necessary to her? Does Bay Borough represent a "past," Baltimore a "present"?

Suggestions for further reading
Anita Brookner, Hotel Du Lac; Evan S. Connell, Mr. Bridge; Mrs. Bridge; Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House; Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud;" Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Later the Same Day; Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings, Excellent Women; J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat; Joanna Trollope, The Rector's Wife; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway.

Also by Anne Tyler
If Morning Ever Comes (1964), The Tin Can Tree (1965), A Slipping-Down Life (1970), The Clock Winder (1972), Celestial Navigation (1974), Searching for Caleb (1976), Earthly Possessions (1977), Morgan's Passing (1980), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), Breathing Lessons (1988), Saint Maybe (1991).

Books about Anne Tyler
Tonette Bond Inge, ed., Southern Women Writers the New Generation; Dale Salwak, ed., Anne Tyler as Novelist; C. Ralph Stephens, ed., The Fiction of Anne Tyler; Anne Tyler, "Just Still Writing" in Janet Sternberg, ed., The Writer on Her Work.