Unknowable: Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

Both the positive and the negative aspects of the strong, silent man stereotype come up in Anne Tyler’s novel Breathing Lessons.

Married 28 years, the couple at the heart of Anne Tyler’s 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning Breathing Lessons are clearly meant to show us something about long-run coupledom.  So what does it mean when Maggie Moran refers to her husband Ira in the novel several times as mysteriously unknowable?