Novel: Digging to America

Overview
Anne Tyler's Digging to America traces the tender, often comic entanglements that grow when two American families adopt Korean baby girls on the same day and build a long friendship around their daughters. Set in a comfortably ordinary American suburb, the story watches small domestic rituals and the slow accretions of habit that define marriage, parenthood, and neighborliness. Tyler's eye settles on the ordinary with warm curiosity, turning routine events, birthday parties, holiday gatherings, awkward conversations, into moments that reveal character and change.

Main characters and plot
Two couples, living next door to one another, bring home infant girls from Korea and begin an unplanned, decades-long social arrangement. The parents differ in temperament and background, and those differences shape the ways they raise their children, celebrate their arrivals, and interpret the world. The adoptive daughters grow up under parallel roofs yet chart distinct paths as they negotiate identity, family loyalty, and the pull of their birth culture. The neighborly ties tighten and fray through rites of passage, misunderstandings, and affection, producing both gentle comedy and quieter heartbreak as the children become adolescents and young adults.

Themes and tone
Digging to America explores belonging, cultural difference, and the improvisations families make to feel whole. Tyler pays close attention to naming, language, and ritual as clues to how people construct identity. Questions about what it means to "put down roots" surface repeatedly, literalized in images of gardening, houses, and the domestic work of making a home. The tone balances light humor with compassion; awkwardness and petty grievances are treated with empathy, so that characters who irritate each other are never caricatured but remain recognizably human.

Style and structure
Tyler writes with a gentle, observational prose that privileges character detail over plot contrivance. Scenes often hinge on gestures, misread intentions, and the stubborn logic of personality rather than dramatic turns. Time moves forward in manageable leaps, and recurring events, meals, anniversaries, visits, function as a kind of chorus, marking how relationships alter imperceptibly. Dialogue feels natural and domestic, and the narrative favors episodes that illuminate inner life, revealing priorities through the small things people do for one another.

Family, identity, and empathy
At its heart, the novel asks how families absorb difference and what it costs to hold together across mismatched expectations. Adoptive parents confront their own assumptions about culture and race while trying to honor the girls' origins without turning heritage into a performance. The story privileges empathy as a practice: characters learn to see one another's needs even when they misstep. Tyler resists tidy resolutions; instead she offers a patient account of how ordinary people adapt, make mistakes, and, more often than not, persist in caring.

Resonance and reception
Digging to America has been noted for its warmth, wit, and humane scrutiny of domestic life. Readers often respond to the specificity with which Tyler renders ordinary scenes and to her ability to make small acts feel consequential. The novel does not offer sweeping political statements about immigration or identity but provides a humane, intimate portrait of cultural difference handled at the scale of daily life, suggesting that belonging is carved out slowly, through the repeated, imperfect work of family and friendship.