‘Vinegar Girl’ by Anne Tyler is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series – a project which involves today’s bestselling novelists retelling William Shakespeare’s best known plays. In this modern interpretation of the comedy ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, Kate Battista is a single twenty-nine-year-old nursery teacher living with her absent-minded academic father Louis and her fifteen-year-old sister Bunny. Her father hatches a plan to marry Kate off to his socially awkward eastern European lab assistant Pyotr so he can stay in the United States after his Visa expires.
I have to confess that my knowledge of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ is mainly derived from the 1999 film ‘10 Things I Hate About You’ rather than the play itself so for me, ‘Vinegar Girl’ was more like reading a parody of a parody. I think ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ can be difficult to translate convincingly into a 21st-century setting mostly because the modern context of marriage is so different from what it used to be. Whereas marriage was left out of the high school setting of ’10 Things I Hate About You’, Tyler appears to have stuck more rigidly to this aspect of the plot and at times, Kate appears to be unconvincingly compliant to her father’s plan and abandons her suspicions too easily.
Overall, Tyler’s comic instincts are a good match for one of Shakespeare’s lighter plays but ‘Vinegar Girl’ lacks the dark undertones of her best writing. Admittedly, some of the more subtle jokes and allusions in ‘Vinegar Girl’ are likely to have been a bit lost on me, so I would like to read a couple of the other Hogarth Shakespeare titles based on the plays I know best. Having studied both for A Level English Literature, I am particularly interested in Gillian Flynn’s take on ‘Hamlet’ which is out next year and Margaret Atwood’s interpretation of ‘The Tempest’ to be published later this month. Many thanks to Vintage Books for the review copy of ‘Vinegar Girl’.
I’ve had a copy of ‘Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant’ on my shelf for ages which is one of Tyler’s earlier novels published in 1982. I’d heard it is among her best work, and now that I’ve read it, I can say that it is probably my favourite of the four novels I have read by her. Set in mid-twentieth century Baltimore, Pearl Tull is suddenly deserted by her travelling salesman husband Beck in 1944 to bring up their three children Cody, Ezra and Jenny on her own and tries to carry on as though nothing has happened. When Pearl is dying in her eighties, the Tulls look back on how Beck’s absence has affected the family over the years but with very different viewpoints of what actually happened. Meanwhile Ezra makes a final attempt to unite the family for a meal at the restaurant he owns.
‘Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant’ is a finely observed portrait of a highly dysfunctional family. Pearl, Cody, Ezra and Jenny have conflicting memories and interpretations of events that have occurred over the years and Tyler unpicks their individual flaws and resentments towards each other with devastating precision. As with her other books, ‘Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant’ is likely to appeal to readers who don’t mind a plot which unfurls very slowly but is ultimately rewarding in its quietly powerful conclusion.
Overall, ‘Vinegar Girl’ was more whimsical than its title suggests whereas ‘Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant’ implies sentimentality but offers something a lot more complex under the surface. I think the latter is a good place to start for those who are new to Tyler’s work.
A Little Blog of Books 
I’m not a huge Tyler fan – I think because I had to study Homesick as a school text and you know how it is when you have had to study a text so closely – you’re over it! However, I will check out Vinegar Girl at some point. I read another in this series (Jeanette Winterson’s A Gap in Time, a retelling of Winter’s Tale, and I loved it).
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Yes I can understand how analysing a text in that level of detail can make it difficult to really love a book! I’ll look out for the Jeanette Winterson book.
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I think dysfunctional families is what Anne Tyler does best, from Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant to A Spool of Blue Thread. Nice reviews!
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Thanks! Yes, absolutely, it’s what she’s stuck to for pretty much her whole career.
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Interesting review – I came at it from a slightly different perspective, having read the original Shakespeare but no other Anne Tyler.
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Thanks, yes it is similar in style to her other novels, particularly in the way she has written the characters, so if you enjoyed it you may like her other books too.
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Love Anne Tyler!
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Great review. I’ve heard mixed reviews of Vinegar Girl, as you mention The Taming of the Shrew is perhaps not the easiest of plays to update to a modern setting which no doubt made it a challenging task.
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Thanks, yes I wonder if Tyler felt restricted by having to stick to a set plot when she was writing it.
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Loved this review. I am a committed Anne Tyler reader and agree that she did not quite bring off the translation of the play into the 21st. By far the best Hogarth Shakespeare, so far, is Jeanette Winterson’s rendering of The Winter’s Tale, a play which she obviously loves and thoroughly understands (which maybe why Tyler’s book doesn’t work so well). Can hardly wait for Margaret Atwood, but even more am yearning to read Jo Nesbo’s take on Macbeth. Howard Jacobson did a different thing with The Merchamt of Venice, clever but a slight swerve from the concept, I think.
As a tribute to Shakespeare I cannot think of a better idea, and salute Hogarth Press, even though some are bound to be better than others. I have read them all as they have appeared.
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Thanks, that’s really interesting and Jo Nesbo’s take on Macbeth sounds intriguing too. I agree that it’s inevitable that adaptations of this type are likely to be hit and miss depending on the play and the author.
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Tyler is one of my favourite authors, and I’ve read everything by her except for Vinegar Girl and Spool of Blue Thread. Then there will be no more, which pains me!
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Hopefully something will coax her out of retirement at some point!
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Margaret Atwood’s take on The Tempest, Hag-seed has just arrived, can hardly wait to get going; it looks suitably macabre and mysterious and is longer than any of the other three.
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Great, I will look into that one!
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The only book i have read by Anne Tyler is Vinegar Girl. While I liked it pretty well, it came across to me as a little chick lit-ish. I will have to try another of her books and see how I like that dark undertone that you speak of. Thanks for the write up.
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Yes I don’t think Vinegar Girl is as sharp as her other books but it’s worth investigating her back catalogue.
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Heard so much about Tyler, yet when I read these two titles I failed to understand why there is so much accolade. Maybe I don’t care for dysfunctional family novels.
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I think people either really like Tyler’s writing or they don’t get on with her at all, particularly as she explores similar themes again and again so it is less likely that her books will appeal to different readers’ tastes.
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