Vinegar Girl

By Anne Tyler
  • Classic
  • Fiction
  • Relationship
Previously, I reviewed Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld’s take on Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, so as a kind of companion piece I’ve decided to do one of the Hogarth Shakespeare series: “The world’s favourite playwright. Today’s best-loved novelists. Timeless stories retold” runs the tag-line. So does this re-write of The Taming of the shrew live up to the hype? 
Well no, not at all, thank God. Good old Willie Shakespeare may have written some excellent plays but this early effort of his, telling as it does the story of a high-spirited, smart-talking woman who is brow-beaten into submission and forcibly married off to satisfy a bet is certainly no favourite of mine and is repugnant to most modern audiences. Whatever Shakespeare’s intentions (maybe he was trying for irony?) Tyler has sensibly decided to swerve the worst excesses of misogyny in the original play – in fact her novel seems to me closer to 10 things I hate about you, a teen take on Taming set in high school. Like that film Vinegar Girl allows the heroine (the shrew) to face some personal demons, spar with a like-minded alpha male and ultimately find happiness, while keeping her spirit and personality firmly intact.
Anne Tyler, the quiet chronicler of middle-class, American family life, is a slightly odd choice to take on the re-write of this tale of violence and melodrama, and indeed she seemed to struggle with some of the material – for example her inability to make her shrew in any way shrewish. Kate is a classroom assistant at a pre-school who seems to have given up on life, but the worst you could say about her is that she doesn’t wear make-up or cut her hair and has a slightly abrupt and forthright way of speaking – hardly surprising in view of her upbringing by a socially inept scientist father. So far, so puzzling – where is this story going? Enter Pyotr, her father’s lab assistant from Eastern Europe, to where he’s about to be deported, and a plan is hatched to marry him to Kate so he can get his green card. Pyotr, thankfully, is no Petruchio, but a rather charming gentle giant, whose funny, “foreign” turns of phrase and way of delivering compliments, (like stones that thud at her feet) soon bring out the better side of her nature and… well everyone knows how the story ends.
This is a pleasant, amusing read but both Tyler and Shakespeare have written better – see Breathing Lessons and Hamlet. The best thing about Vinegar Girl is Pyotr’s ungrammatical wooing of Kate, and I was tickled to come across this quote from Anne Tyler in an interview about her husband:
“Taghi’s first complete sentence to me was, “It wonders me why you are so hostile.” I can’t say it was love at first sight, but we got married seven months later.”
Staff Pick By
Oonagh