Tyler Has Fun! 
 The Hogarth Shakespeare novels,* in which well-known authors riff on selected plays, are a kind of double variation. We see the author taking a sideways look at Shakespeare, but we also see how Shakespeare casts a fresh light on the author's oeuvre. In translocating The Taming of the Shrew to Baltimore, Anne Tyler is on home ground (the very area in which I am now writing), but the nimble comedy that results shows an unusually light side of her; she has fun and so do we. And she rings her variations on Shakespeare too: far from being a shrew, her Kate is a thoroughly delightful and sympathetic character from the beginning. This is a love story, a true romance. 
 Tyler simplifies the story, reducing it to four essential characters plus a bunch of minor ones who have no close equivalent in the play. But she doesn't duck the main plot points: a hot-tempered older daughter, the brash young man who undertakes to marry her, his outburst of violence on their wedding day, and the bride's speech of submission at the end. Shakespeare's final scene, in which Katherine addresses her younger sister Bianca on the sovereignty of men, has long been a problem for modern commentators, because it seems to represent a complete capitulation to male hierarchy. How could Tyler, very much a feminist in her own writing, make such an ending work for her? All I can say is that she does, without ever selling out, performing a miracle I would have thought impossible, and reinforcing her view of marriage as a willing bond between equals. 
 Kate Battista is the 29-year-old daughter of a medical research scientist at Johns Hopkins. Clearly brilliant, she got herself expelled from college for telling her professor that his account of photosynthesis was half-assed (by her father's standards, that is), and never bothered to reapply. Now she spends her time working at a nursery school and keeping house for her father and bratty teen sister Bunny. She is put-upon and under-challenged; despite her inability to suffer fools gladly, you find yourself rooting for her from beginning to end. Her Petruchio is Pyotr Scherbakov, her father's brilliant Russian research assistant, whose O-1 visa will expire in two months, hence the need to get him married; it is the eccentric self-centered father who is the motive power behind this plot. Pyotr has little of the macho swagger of Petruchio in the play; instead he is quite comic in his inept English and the mangled Russian proverbs he keeps quoting. It is true that on the wedding day we see a quite different side to Pyotr--but this comes about because of a plot twist that is one of the most ingenious things in the book, kicking the last 50 pages into exciting high gear. 
 Yet this is comedy, not farce. Tyler does not reach for the violent extremes of the Shakespeare play, but gives us a depth of sympathy with the title character that Shakespeare does not even attempt; there is an especially good scene when Kate is left alone in the apartment less than an hour after the wedding. There were times when I thought more of Jane Austen, seeing Kate as a kind of Emma Woodhouse. There will be those who object to this softening and miss the fire of the original. But for me, the humanity that Tyler brought to it was perfect. This is the most sheerly enjoyable book of hers I have ever read, and unquestionably the most consistently successful of the three Hogarth Shakespeare titles published thus far.* 
 * 
 The Gap of Time 
 by Jeanette Winterson (The Winter's Tale) 
 Shylock Is My Name 
 by Howard Jacobson (The Merchant of Venice) 
 Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler (The Taming of the Shrew)