Lawrence.com

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.

With the lilt of a fairy tale and the deadpan sharpness of a keen observer, Anne Tyler opens her 15th novel, "Back When We Were Grownups" (Alfred A. Knopf, 279 pages, $25), with the promise to explore a life in the way only Tyler can.

Tyler trains her gift for detail, character and the absurdity of the everyday on Rebecca Davitch. The 53-year-old is "wide and soft and dimpled" with a "loose and colorful style of dress edging dangerously close to Bag Lady."

Rebecca is a grandmother, a mother to a daughter and a stepmother to three girls she inherited when she married Joe, the proprietor of the Open Arms, an aging Baltimore row house the Davitch family has turned into a reception hall for parties.

Celebrations, though, do not come easy to the depressive Davitches. At 20, Rebecca happens upon the clan � 33-year-old Joe in need of a wife, Joe's tearful mother, Aunt Joyce and Uncle Poppy and assorted others � at an engagement party in honor of a friend.

Rebecca, knowing no one at the party but the honoree, is the outsider looking in when she shares an unusual peal of laughter with Zeb, Joe's teen-age brother. It is precisely then Joe spots her. He tells her, "I see you're having a wonderful time."

It is a classic Anne Tyler moment. Joe's pronouncement shapes the way Joe and the Davitch family, desperate in their need, see the staid and shy Rebecca: celebratory, cheerful, fun-loving. It is the axis on which Rebecca's life turns.

She quickly leaves her steady, dependable fianc� for the Davitch whirlwind and marriage, instant motherhood and the Open Arms, a business as in need of Rebecca's perceived social cheer as the Davitch family.

But as a 53-year-old widow (Joe dies early in her marriage) she wonders: Who am I? What am I doing here? What happened to the stoic, quiet history buff who was no more at home at a party than she would have been in a circus?

As in many of Tyler's novels, our protagonist is an outsider. Rebecca is comfortable neither in the Davitch sphere nor in the world she left behind. (Macon in "The Accidental Tourist" and Delia in "The Ladder of Years" come to mind.) The Davitch family members Rebecca most gravitates toward also are outsiders.

Rebecca's past unfolds in flashbacks, allowing her to understand the importance of scenes in her daily life she barely noticed the first time around. Joe's pronouncement that she was having a wonderful time, the family's insistence on calling her "Beck" the first time they meet her, a physically intimate interaction with her fianc� before she met Joe: All adhere to Tyler's gift for showing how the small, daily events dictate a life's path.

Tyler extracts the details with her usual skill. She never fails to leave the reader with insights gained and new ways to view the old.

She combines beautiful and incisive writing with the touching, jumbled emotions of family.

In one typical Tyler scene, Uncle Poppy explains grief: "People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes. The first day is really hard, but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it's like water. Every day you notice the person's absence more."

Some of Tyler's descriptions in this novel fall short of her usual skill (an interracial granddaughter's skin is the color of a baked potato), and the scene in which she introduces the Davitch family plays slightly forced.

A shortcoming in the plot: Why has it taken Rebecca so long to question her place? Joe is long dead, the children long grown.

But for the most part, Tyler's renderings succeed. Rebecca, for instance, sees herself as a kaleidoscope, all disjointed and changing with every turn.

As always, Tyler is foremost a storyteller who entertains. She lets the reader forgive the Davitch family's befuddling habits with large doses of humor.

Tyler takes apart Rebecca's life and puts it back together again in the simultaneously slightly depressing and uplifting way that is Tyler's signature.

In her initial look back, Rebecca says she did not choose Joe as much as she was "swept along" by him. Rebecca comes to learn how she was both swept away and decisive in choosing her fate.