![]() ![]() They make such a performance that we hardly notice a younger couple, accompanied only by one grandmother-to-be, completely absorbed in the arrival of their own baby - the more fragile Sooki. ![]() Bitsy and Brad Donaldson (sporting MOM and DAD badges) have brought their entire clan, two sets of GRANDMAs and GRANDPAs, UNCLEs and COUSINs all attached to video cameras to record the arrival of the wholesome Jin Ho. Recalling her earlier novel, Back When We Were Grown Up, about a family whose lives are overrun by entertaining, Digging to America is constructed around a succession of superbly comic family gatherings, the first at Baltimore airport. However, though 9/11 is alluded to only glancingly, it seems not even she has been completely immune to the events of the last few years. ![]() ![]() To call the novel political would be overstating the case: Tyler is, after all, the celebrated chronicler of everyday America, often compared to Jane Austen not only for her wit and lightness of touch, but for the myopic absence of any world view. But the arrival of two foreign babies brings new, perhaps more timely, considerations: cultural differences, tolerance and assimilation, and, above all, the idea of what it means to be an American. ![]()
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