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Every time I pick up the latest novel by Anne Tyler, I wonder whether she is quite as good as her fans, of which I am one, like to think. Is she, in fact, no more than the Thinking Woman’s Good Holiday Read?

No more than that! many readers will exclaim (and perhaps, like Henry Tilney, add that men ‘read nearly as many as women’): only a thoroughly readable book that doesn’t insult your intelligence! Even outside the airport bookshop, we are all grateful to find such a treasure.

But there are a lot of readable books out there of the sort recommended by the Richard and Judy Book Club (no sneer at all intended: their choice encompasses some excellent works); and the question is why Anne Tyler should stand out.

For some readers, of course, she does not: some find her too middlebrow to be first- rate. There is a bolus of undigested intellectual snobbery in that formulation; but if you think that middlebrow fiction is largely middle-class, about ‘relationships’, and traditional in form, Tyler’s novels will, on the surface, fit the bill. They are mostly set in the suburbs of Baltimore, where a quiet cancer is more likely to get you than an axe-wielding madman, and revolve around extended family gatherings, where bickering is more the norm than incest. There is nothing tricky, self-referential or obviously experimental about them. How safe or even dull that makes them sound!

Of course, big issues do not in themselves make a fine book. Many thoroughly middlebrow novels thrive on them. Jodi Picoult’s stonking emotional blockbuster, My Sister’s Keeper, for example, is an investigation of the ethics of creating a designer child as a donor to save a sick sibling: it is a serious topic and makes, indeed, a page-turning read, but one that is neither morally nor psychologically subtle.