Ladder Of Years

LADDER OF YEARS

by Anne Tyler

 

Nomination: Women’s Prize Finalist 1996

 

Date Read: December 29, 2022

 

You know how make-up tutorials that look like a hot mess say “trust the process.” And then they end up stunning. I would have to say the same about Ladder Of Years. While the story was engrossing and the characters rich and vivid, I couldn’t understand Delia’s motives for walking away. It was never quite clear. Yet, I know that there is nothing more invisible than a middle aged woman.

 

Delia is married to Sam, a doctor, and has three children – Susan, Ramsay and Carroll. Her kids are all in their late teens and early twenties and on the precipice of starting their own lives. As Delia begins to realize she is no longer needed – by her kids or her husband – a chance encounter at a grocery store begins an affair with a neighbor. Although never consummated, Delia relished being desired, seen and sought after. Who doesn’t?

 

Realizing this grocery store man is not what she ultimately wants (does she ever really decide? Does she ever really decide anything?), on the annual family trip to the shore, Delia grabs her beach bag while at the beach with her family and just walks away with nothing more than the clothes (or rather, lack of clothes) on her back. She has no idea where she’s going or what she’s going to do.

 

Delia ends up settling in a small town about two hours away from Baltimore – the kind of town where everyone knows each other and is in everyone’s business. As Delia takes one logical step after the next, she finds herself almost in exactly the same position as before – taking care of a man and his son, adopting a cat, building friendships and living the exact same life just with other people.

 

What bothered me throughout was her lack of regret, self-doubt and longing for her family. She doesn’t seem to miss her husband or kids at all. She is super-humanly detached from her previous life and continues in this new life without really looking back. Her kids come to ask her what she’s doing and when she’s coming home but her answers are always vague.

 

Only at the end does the reader get clued in that all she really wanted was to be asked to come home. For just one of her family to ask her, so she knows that she’s missed and wanted. And there’s a large part of me that empathizes with that. And Tyler beautifully and brilliantly ends her novel:

 

“Now she saw that June beach scene differently. Her three children, she saw, had been staring at the horizon with the alert, tensed stillness of explorers at the ocean’s edge, poised to begin their journeys. And Delia, shading her eyes in the distance, had been trying to understand why they were leaving. Where they were going without her. How to say goodbye.”