Is there a child in America who hasn’t heard the myth that if you start digging a hole in the back yard, and you dig deep enough, you’ll end up in China? Anne Tyler turns this image on its head for her touching new novel, and writes about what it’s like to come from somewhere else and end up in the United States, as a child or as an adult.

Maryam, the widowed Mrs. Yazdan, is that typical Tyler creation, the semi-oddball. A person of strong will and starchy temperament, Maryam is not against passion but finds American effusiveness off-putting. She muses often about an immigrant’s untethered fate, although she has lived in Baltimore for 39 years, raised her son here and has no desire to return to Iran, a country so changed in the ensuing decades that it can never count as her home again. But settling permanently in America does not make one an American, and the diffidence that Maryam feels about her adopted country becomes a major theme of the novel.

Although Maryam’s son Sami is so gleefully American that he feels most comfortable when manning the grill in the backyard of his suburban McMansion, he did choose to marry an Iranian girl, who came to this country with her parents after the 1979 revolution. Maryam looks down on her in-laws - looking down is her favorite stance - and she suspects that Ziba’s parents were cozy with the shah, whom she abhorred.

Tyler’s late husband was an Iranian-American psychiatrist, Taghi Modarressi, and she obviously draws upon her exposure to the Iranian emigre world to create these fictional families. Indeed, the book is vastly enlivened by Tyler’s use of Persian phrases, plus descriptions of the cuisines and the mores of the Iranian community.

But in "Digging to America," Tyler also holds up a mirror to the wider American culture, especially the contemporary obsession with child-rearing that makes young children kings and queens in their households. Jin-Ho’s mother, an earnest matron called Bitsy, is so caught up in current thinking on child development that she wears black and white for the entire first year of motherhood "because babies can only see black and white."

Ziba Yazdan, although more glamorous and just as devoted to her child as Bitsy, is often cowed by her friend’s politically correct convictions on how to parent. But it’s notable that although the all-American Donaldsons chose to keep Jin-Ho’s Korean name and dress her often in Korean garb, the less-established Yazdans name their daughter Susan and are most anxious about getting her into - and paying for - a fancy private school.

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