Anne Tyler begins her fifteenth novel with a gloriously engaging and theatrical sentence, "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person." Many of us can get aboard that sentence and follow wherever it leads. We carry in hearts and minds images of the kind of person we would become by middle age. So, how are we doing?

At 53, Rebecca Davitch finds herself running a party and catering service whose slogan is "All of Life's Occasions from the Cradle to the Grave." She's surrounded by three stepdaughters, her own daughter, a 99-year-old great uncle, and various members of her deceased husband Joe's extended family.

As family matriarch, she has organized countless parties, celebrations, anniversaries, and weddings at Open Arms, the ground floor of their nineteenth century Baltimore row house. Rebecca, called "Beck" by members of the clan, is known for her cute rhyming toasts and her ability to lift the spirits of those around her. Joe had first seen his wife to be "as the girl enjoying the party more than anyone else in the room. He had clung to that image obstinately." But, in her heart Rebecca sees herself as a more reserved and retiring person. All of her life she's tried to live up to the expectations of others and now at midlife, she wants out of this imposed role as the enthusiastic one.

Rebecca revisits her mother in her hometown and makes contact with Will Allenby, her high school and college sweetheart she jilted for Joe. We identify completely with her yearning to explore the road not taken. So many middle agers are filled with regrets over choices made long ago. We cheer Rebecca on as she reviews her life, weighing everything like a grocer. But in the end, Tyler sheds even more light on the spiritual practice of enthusiasm. What she leaves us with is hinted at in the following quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life was wonderful; it is by abandonment."