ANNE TYLER'S compelling storytelling skills come to the fore once again in her ambitious and melancholic 16th novel. Spanning 60 years, “The Amateur Marriage” is an exposé of all the hopes, disappointments, arguments and accusations of a claustrophobic mismatch.

Michael Anton's quiet life amid the tinned peas, soap and cereals of his mother's grocery store in Baltimore's Polish neighbourhood is tossed into the air by the whirlwind arrival of the pretty, vibrant, red-coated Pauline Barclay. Caught up by the tumult of the second world war, he enlists to impress her, is injured and, on his return into a war-time world of “abbreviated, slapdash weddings”, they marry, full of the innocent expectation of youth.

While the complexities of family life are described in absorbing detail—the arrival of children, the decline of a parent—it is Ms Tyler's ability to conjure a character in a few succinct phrases that draws the reader deep into the whirling resentment and misunderstanding that becomes Pauline's and Michael's marriage. “By nature Pauline tumbled through life helter-skelter while Michael proceeded deliberately. She was brimming with energy—a floor pacer, a foot jiggler, a finger drummer—while he was slow and plodding and secretly somewhat lazy.”

As the years roll by in ten measured chapters neither Pauline nor Michael is able to understand or accept the other's defining traits. She is all thoughtless chatter: “Sometimes I don't even know what I'm feeling till I've said it out loud to Mimi or Dot.” He simmers with uncommunicated frustration: “Surely other people's marriages were not so ragged and uneven?”

Some readers may chafe as weighty subjects, such as the daughter who vanishes into a cult group, are introduced, some so slightly that questions are left hanging, but this may be inevitable in a book focusing on the minutiae of life over such a wide sweep of time. But, as a portrait of two discordant personalities struggling under life's umbrella, “The Amateur Marriage” is both comic and sad, but as always in a Tyler novel, heartfelt and deftly observed.