French Braid by Anne Tyler

In an entry from 1977 in “The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates” she remarks that “Anne Tyler's imagination turns (instinctively?) toward her central theme of staying-in-one-place / running-away. Taking on responsibilities / ridding oneself of all responsibility.” This is certainly noticeable in many of Tyler's novels – most notably in “Ladder of Years”. There's a persistent tension for many characters between maintaining the life they've built and leaving it behind. In her latest novel “French Braid” we have an example of a character who, in a sense, has it both ways. Mercy is the matriarch of the Garrett clan. Though in her younger days she fantasized about walking out on her life she has loyally loved and supported her husband and three children for decades. But her natural domain isn't the domestic. Once their youngest child has flown the coop she embarks on pursuing her passion for painting and gradually moves out of the family home into her artist's studio. She's developed a technique for painting a family's home by focusing on one aspect which is represented in high detail while the rest remains a bit of a blur. Mercy's living arrangement mostly goes unspoken amongst the family so she maintains her position while achieving a kind of independent freedom. It's an excellent compromise for a riddle that has been threaded throughout so much of this author's meaningful body of work.

The novel begins in 2010 before leaping back to a rare Garrett family holiday in 1959 and skipping forward through the decades alighting focus on several different members of the household. Similar to Tyler's “A Spool of Blue Thread” we get a broader picture of these individuals by seeing brief snapshots of them in different periods of time. Gradually we come to understand how this family has maintained loose bonds while living separately and largely unknown to each other. Though they are reunited for some holidays and anniversaries, other occasions such as weddings aren't always marked with the traditional get together. Tyler presents instances when they do see each other with a wonderful amount of detail and dialogue which captures all the awkwardness and uncertainty of people who are united through coincidence of birth rather than natural affection. Men in the family revert to bland discussions about the traffic getting there. Women side-eye the choices of dishes brought to the dining table. These are familiar figures who are of a certain type – yet they are also unique and distinct. Mercy and her husband Robin's son David doesn't conform to his father's masculine expectations. The rift this causes is subtle yet severe in creating a longstanding distance which is never entirely broached. It's just one example of how this family has drifted apart while still remaining roughly connected. Though Robin might be simply viewed as a domineering dad he's depicted with a lot of compassion and sympathy showing how evenhanded Tyler is when writing her characters.

The title of the novel is acknowledged as a metaphorical cliché when an older David observes how this style of hair arrangement which leaves waves in the strands when undone is “how families work, too. You think you're free of them, but you're never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever.” It's a bit of hard-won terse wisdom which is a platitude but still essentially true. However, the real understanding of family life comes from looking at members as individuals caught in different periods of time and circumstances. This is the technique Tyler has employed and which Mercy might have depicted visually if she painted people rather than objects. It's wonderfully affecting as the novel builds to say so much more than any of its finely-observed parts. Tyler's ability to find profundity in the mundane without any overly dramatic plotting is unparalleled and highly accomplished.

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

Like a lot of people I’ve sometimes found reading difficult during this period of national lockdown. It can be challenging to concentrate when there’s so much anxiety all around me. So the calm and measured thoughtfulness found in Anne Tyler’s new novel is greatly welcome at this time. Since she focuses on psychological nuance and a realistic portrayal of daily experience nothing very dramatic or distressing often occurs in Tyler’s novels. That’s true for this book as well although there is an imagined apocalyptic scene which felt surprisingly relevant for this current time. At one point the protagonist has a fantasy that his community has been hit by “one of those neutron bombs they used to talk about that wiped out all of humanity but left the buildings intact” so that he imagines himself as the sole survivor and, while he would occupy himself with his usual solitary activities, he’d eventually go out looking for other people and find “Nothing.” This is exactly the sort of existential crisis many are experiencing now when they venture outside to a normally bustling community and find no one around. So this added a touching poignancy to an all-around gentle story about a man caught in the humdrum routines of his well-established lifestyle.

The novel follows the daily experiences of Micah, a man on the brink of middle age who has a lowkey life working as a “glorified handyman” assisting local individuals with their computer problems. He runs his independent business under the name Tech Hermit which is a title all too appropriate for him. Although he has a long-term girlfriend and close connections with his family, his life is dominated by tidy habits which shield him from any messiness in his home or emotional messiness. Eventually this distances him from those closest to him and when the son of an old flame arrives at his doorstep he finds himself confronted by how severely circumscribed his existence has become. As often happens in Tyler’s novel, the mundane details of ordinary life gradually build to something much more moving, substantial and profound. Few writers can capture the way individuals are trapped in the steady flow of time the way Tyler does.

My favourite novel by Tyler is “Ladder of Years” which concerns a wife and mother who literally walks away from her life to enjoy some precious much-needed solitude. In a way, “Redhead by the Side of the Road” offers an opposite point of view about a man who has consciously built a self-contained solitary world for himself but finds when he’s left absolutely alone he needs others to provide a form of disruption to his orderly routines. This causes him to glancingly imagine others around him when there’s really no one there such as when he comes upon a fire hydrant that he regularly passes by: “He momentarily mistook the hydrant for a redhead and gave his usual shake of the shoulders at how repetitious this thought was, how repetitious all his thoughts were, how they ran in a deep rut and how his entire life ran in a rut, really.” While many of us long for a special kind of solace found in being entirely alone, an important aspect of human nature is maintaining some form of human contact. Yes, this will inevitably lead to disorder or even chaos but part of the pleasure of living is not being able to predict what these interactions will bring. This novel shows that Tyler’s humble story can provide a startlingly timely message.

Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

After reading Jeanette Winterson’s novel “The Gap of Time”, I was thrilled to see that the Hogarth Shakespeare series also includes a new novel from Anne Tyler - one of my favourite authors. Winterson brilliantly combined her writing style and individual sensibility to open a dialogue with Shakespeare’s ideas/themes from The Winter’s Tale. I was a big advocate and fan of Tyler’s previous novel “A Spool of Blue Thread” last year which divided a lot of people, but I found it to be an inventive and meaningful story about generations of family life. Now Anne Tyler has given her “spin” on The Taming of the Shrew with this new novel “Vinegar Girl”. Firstly, I must admit that Shrew is the play by Shakespeare that I like the least. I find its ambiguous take on gender politics grating and more than anything I find the story to be rather dull. I even dislike Cole Porter’s musical ‘Kiss Me, Kate’ despite being a big fan of Porter’s music otherwise. So it’s an interesting experiment to pair Tyler with this problematic work by the Bard.

Tyler transposes the story of The Taming of the Shrew to the modern day and her familiar territory of Baltimore. Kate Battista is a young teacher’s assistant who is “big boned and gawky.” She takes care of both her father Louis, a distracted scientist working relentlessly on researching an autoimmune disease, and her popular teenage sister Bunny (Bernice) who outshines her with golden girls and a newfound interest in animal rights’ activism. Meanwhile, Kate makes horrifying sounding dinners with a dish she calls “meat mash” and comes perilously close to losing her job from expressing her opinions too bluntly to her young pupils and their parents. Louis’ lab assistant Pyotr lives in America on a work visa which will soon expire. To continue his important research Louis plots to marry Kate off to him to keep him in the country. Both Pyotr and Kate have somewhat abrasive personalities and awkward social skills. A comic story ensues.

The most successful parts of this novel were Kate’s interactions at the “Little People’s School” between the children and teachers. She generally doesn’t like most of the children and often treats them with a level of contempt where it’s remarked “It wasn’t true that she hated children. At least, a few she liked okay. It was just that she didn’t like all children, as if they were uniform members of some microphylum or something.” It is quite funny how straightforward she is with these children who are only four years old and how her manner totally goes against current prevailing attitudes of coddling young people to ensure each feels special. There are a number of enjoyably tense scenes with the principal Mrs Darling where you can feel her polite sunny veneer flaking away and her frustration over Kate’s unapologetic blunt manner growing.

Elizabeth Taylor as Katharina in Zeffirelli's 'Taming of the Shrew'

Tyler is also excellent at portraying minute actions in the way family members react to and relate to one another to show imbalances. Kate has been pushed into a mothering role since the family lost their mother which is something she readily accepted at first but now she finds herself turned into an unpleasant person. Louis increasingly takes her for granted requiring her to bring him his lunch and do his taxes. Bunny’s transformation into a hungry-for-romance teen means that Kate feels her sister has “changed into this whole other person, this social person, I don’t know; this social, outgoing person. And somehow she turned me into this viperish, disapproving old maid when I’m barely twenty-nine. I don’t know how that happened!” It’s moving the way that Tyler shows how people morph into certain roles within family life which they feel helpless to extract themselves from. Rather than taking an independent stand, Kate takes the rather non-feminist decision of using marriage as a way of getting out of her constrictive family circumstances.

This is where the novel somewhat troubles me. Both Louis and Pyotr treat Kate abysmally at some points and act in a horrendously selfish manner. Rather than expressing her intolerance for this behaviour or leaving them, Kate expresses an understanding for their foibles because that’s the way men are and she softens her acid tone. She delivers a speech at the end stating this in a way which is carefully modified from Katherine’s famous open-to-interpretation monologue at the end of The Taming of the Shrew. I didn’t find the development of the difficult relationship between Kate and Pyotr convincing. Rather than elucidate the building relationship of these problematic characters, Tyler gets bogged down in tedious details like methods of loading the dishwasher or the laborious process of cooking an egg. It felt overall like Tyler got too bogged down with trying to rejuvenate the mechanics of the Bard’s story rather than making the tale wholly her own as Winterson ingeniously did. Although “Vinegar Girl” is an enjoyable read I don’t think it’s Tyler’s best.

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

It's always felt to me that at the centre of Anne Tyler's novels about genteel middle class Baltimore life there is horrific fear. What if this life you've worked so hard for is something you wake up wanting to escape from? What if the people closest to you and the family you've known all your life turn out to be strangers? Tyler presents these insolvable dilemmas by following the daily life of her characters while also acknowledging the absurdity and uselessness of the questions. Of course there are a multitude of possibilities in life and we can't choose them all because we're caught in the unstoppable flow of time which necessarily limits the options we have. Even though we can spend our lives with people we're linked to by blood or marriage and we can know their habits, we cannot know what's truly in their hearts. In Tyler's fiction people can walk out the door one evening to become someone new or wake in the morning to see that their partner of forty years is someone they've always hated. It's this daily risk which makes the finely constructed domestic detail of her narratives both terrifying and thrilling.

In “A Spool of Blue Thread” she takes a new approach to this by writing a family saga which moves backwards through the generations. At the start we're introduced to the Whitshanks who live in the perfect suburban home. They have four adult children, but it's their third child Denny who is the wayward black sheep. He flashes in and out of family's life unable to settle. Unsurprisingly, it's the troubled child which gets the most attention and therefore draws resentment from his siblings. Tyler then shifts focus to the mother Abby. She writes about Abby and Red's uncomfortable transition from old age to elderly. The family rally together to decide how to care for their parents Red and Abby while still allowing them to maintain their independence. Finally the story moves back to the family's origin: Red's parents Junior and Linnie with their mysterious past. At the centre is the Whitshank family home, an idealized space built by Junior himself for a middle class family and gradually purchased for his own family. The home is passed through the generations as a symbol of self-creation, a quintessential American family who started with nothing and have formed a lineage with many branches.

This novel in triptych form reminds me of Gauguin's incredible painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? from the way it unpretentiously displays every stage of life and multiple generations. At the same time it quietly asks these fundamental questions about the nature of being. Tyler is also cleverly disentangling the myth of the idealized nuclear American family. On the surface, the Whitshanks give an impression of established stability. Yet, everything about them was acquired, if not exactly immorally, but on the sly. Junior schemed to purchase the family home from the Brills, the family he worked for. Red's sister Merrick connived to gain the wealthy husband her good friend intended to marry. A child who is suddenly made an orphan is taken into the Whitshank home and raised as one of their own without any formal adoption taking place. These are all things which the family have appropriated as aspirational accessories to present themselves to the world as who they want to be. The great tension in this novel is between becoming and being. Whether you have truly earned what's in your life or not, when do the people/things around you turn from a symbol of what you want to become into a fundamental part of who you are?

The impressive thing is how lightly Tyler addresses all these concerns in her writing. There is nothing ponderous about her narrative at all filling it with so much detail about the delicate balance of family relationship and the minutiae of daily life. She includes a good degree of humanity and humour into her prose. When recounting one of the two stories which are marked as vital to the family's oral history, Tyler writes of Junior: “In 1936, he fell in love with a house. No, first he must have fallen in love with his wife, because he was married by then.” This sort of wry observation has all the humorous qualities which you can recognize as characteristic of a tale endlessly retold over the dinner table. Only later in the novel does it take on a darker quality. There is a fine balance to the way the family narrates their own story in this novel and the facts of their history which are doled out by Tyler herself.

Many of Tyler's observations about her characters behaviour come across as true to life, things you can relate to yourself or things which you can recognize as similar to people you know. There is the odd occasion when she does slip. When describing in parentheses an example of one character's generosity of spirit she remarks: “(He traded his new bike for a kitten when Jeannie’s beloved cat died.)” It makes me wonder, what sort of transaction would estimate a bike as equivalent value to a kitten – animals which are notoriously given away for free when a family has a cat that's given birth? And even if a trade like this did take place what parent would allow their young boy to make it? Aside from some small quibbles I had at times, Tyler's characters come across as well-formed and relatable.

In this novel's best moments it has all the heft and pleasures of “To the Lighthouse.” Virginia Woolf was a writer who cherished the physical detail and small interactions of life because these tiny realities are the line of life. They add up to saying something substantial and meaningful about existence. “A Spool of Blue Thread” gives us a deep insight into the type of family you could live next door to. At the lake where the Whitshanks vacation every summer there is a family who rent a cabin adjacent to them. They see them every year, but never make contact. Instead they observe subtle changes about how the family grows and changes from a distance. The Whitshanks feel that their story is parallel to their own, but essentially unknown. Tyler's writing is about making that contact where polite society does not. In doing so, she shows all the passion and fear that is a part of every family life.