Embarking on an Anne Tyler novel is like heading off on vacation to a favorite destination: You're filled with anticipation of pleasure, even though you know the place is likely to have changed since your last visit.

The Beginner's Goodbye, Tyler's 19th novel, fulfills that dual craving for familiarity and freshness. Its focus is loss and recovery, grief and growth....

This is not a dramatic transformation but a slow, hard-won realisation that comes with time and constant picking-over the same problem. For the essentially optimistic Tyler, this process allows for rejuvenation and the opportunity for a second chance. For Tyler's many fans, her latest work won't disappoint.

The Beginner's Goodbye," Tyler's 19th novel, features all of these things and more — there is a ghost — and less; just over 200 pages, it is, both in literal weight and narrative complexity, lighter than most of the Tyler canon. Which should not be construed as "less," at least not in the pejorative sense of the word. In many ways, "Goodbye" feels like the center slice of an Anne Tyler novel, a distillation.... The wonder of Anne Tyler is how consistently clear-eyed and truthful she remains about the nature of families and especially marriage.

All of this Tyler understands, tackling Aaron’s sudden loss with characteristic warmth, sympathy and wisdom. As in all her books – and this is one of her great strengths – male and female characters are equally well drawn.

Perhaps the chief constituent of grief is regret: regret for the unkind word, the unexpressed affection, the small opportunities missed. To say that Tyler writes about regret would be like saying that Anton Chekhov writes about boredom: true, but inadequate. Without melodrama but always with compassion, as well as outstanding insight and gentle humour, regret is the abiding theme of her fiction. This makes her especially popular with readers over the age of 35, who are old enough to have started accumulating regrets of their own.

Ms. Tyler’s tepid new novel, “The Beginner’s Goodbye,” doggedly follows this formula, adding a supernatural twist seemingly borrowed from old movies like “Topper” or “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.”...The problem is that the reader couldn’t care less. Whereas Ms. Tyler’s most powerful work has been animated by an intimate knowledge of her characters’ inner lives — sympathy that lofted us up over whatever was clichéd or cloying about their stories — the people in “The Beginner’s Goodbye” are irritating stick figures, insipid and emotionally uptight. .....As the title of “The Beginner’s Goodbye” suggests, Dorothy’s spectral visits are supposed to help Aaron learn to come to terms with her death — and with the imperfections of their marriage — so that he might move on with his life. It’s a trite and predictable lesson from what is arguably this talented author’s tritest and most predictable novel.