‘Digging to America’, by Anne Tyler

This is the seventeenth novel written by Anne Tyler. And, it continues the basic skeletal structure of Tyler who writes about families and sibling relationships and intergenerational themes.

What sets apart each of the novels is the context and historical environment and the ethnic issues surrounding the story line.

In this latest endeavor, Tyler writes about:

- adoption
- cultural contrast with mid-eastern immigrants and American citizens
- the plight of the widowed and widowers
- the need for family support and neighborly support
- differing parental styles.

Tyler is her usual self in the description of the joys and confrontations that arise out of the above themes. She writes with insight and humor.

An example of her insight is the following paragraph depicting the language issues (i.e., dialect) that are common to Iranians.

“…Uttering the phrase “Vigor-Vytes” led Farah to change over to English, probably without meaning to. It was a phenomenon Maryam had often observed among Iranians. They’d be rattling along in Farsi and then some word borrowed from America, generally something technical like ‘television’ or ‘computer’, would flip a switch in their brains and they would continue in English until a Farsi word flipped the switch back again…” P. 143.