Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

You just can't tell with Anne Tyler. In 2012, at the time of the publication of her last novel The Beginner's Goodbye, Tyler said that she hoped that her next novel would take a long time. A Spool of Blue Thread not only hasn't taken a long time in Tyler terms – the usual length of time is three years – but her latest contains 465 pages: about 200 more than her normal offerings. And far from representing a lessening in quality, I consider this to be one of her best.

This is a family saga which weaves about in time, very removed from linearity, and the spool of thread in the title can be taken as both literal and figurative, knitting the disparate parts into the reader's consciousness. Abby Whitshank (Red's wife) is one of the main characters and before she dies in a car collision at about the age of 72 her family believe she's beginning to lose her mind, although glimpses into it suggest that this is far from the case. Especially relevant here is Abby insisting on calling the dog Clarence, whereas Clarence has been dead some time and been replaced by Brenda: I prefer to see this as a literary device, a manifestation of the thread joining different generations – and also as a generic term for the family dog – as opposed to a sign of impending dementia.

As a lover of Anne Tyler's fiction who has read almost all of her novels, I feel compelled to return to my long-established habit of refuting those critics who seem to think that Tyler is a comfortable, light read, a writer of cozy fiction. For instance, an article in The Chicago Tribune 20 June 1986 is written by John Blades and entitled 'For Nutrasweet Fiction, Tyler Takes the Cake', and Blades calls Celestial Navigation (still my favorite Tyler novel) a 'soft-focus and sentimentalized portrait of an outcast artist': Blades can't possibly have read the book because for much of the time it reads like a bad acid trip!

Interestingly – and surely tellingly, as Tyler must have been writing with a knowing wink to Blades's remarkably off-target review – she even mentions Nutrasweet in this latest novel. Which represents a very far from comfortable world. Although Denny only appears 'behind the scenes' when making a telephone call to his parents Abby and Red in 1994, when he was 19 and appears to have been uncertain of his sexual identity, he serves as a framing device for the novel, which ends with him swiftly taking the Amtrak back to his 'home' in New Jersey. It is Denny who mends Red's bright blue dashiki (which itself links two important occasions at very different times) and who finds the original blue thread; and it is also Denny who helps out at his parents' ancestral home when they're in difficulty. But ironically, Denny has also been a very problematic character, a drifter, a worry to his parents, a person who can never settle anywhere or with anyone, who bears some resentment toward Stem, who's not his real brother, but (in spite of having a negligent and usually absent mother) was one of the 'orphans' the social worker Abby took pity on.

Red's parents Junior and Linnie had a far from idyllic marriage, Red and Abby seem to be falling apart due to old age, many people in this novel just don't get on with each other, it can hardly be described as a cozy book with a happy ending, although it is often very, very funny.

This is a remarkable book about families, ageing, compromise, resilience, eccentricity, love, and much more. The modern world makes a bigger appearance than usual in Tyler's novels also, wi-fi and email are mentioned, and, oh, the language is slightly more adventurous. I feel sure that the mischievous Tyler – who usually keeps her speech within the limits of very polite language, her characters frequently uttering such quaint euphemisms as 'jeez!' and 'scheesh!' – deliberately called her main characters in Spool 'Whitshank' just so she could have a walk-on schoolmate call her offspring 'Shitwank'. So much for Nutrasweet.

My other Anne Tyler reviews are below:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)

Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)

This is Anne Tyler's latest novel, and it will probably be several years before she publishes another. It's her nineteenth, and like almost all of her others is set in Baltimore, Maryland, this one again specifically in or near Roland Park, where Tyler has lived for decades. She has a knack of writing about essentially similar subjects with similar characters, and yet each of her works remains distinctly memorable, none of them confusing itself with another. This is quite an achievement.

 

I don't think this is one of her strongest novels, though. It's shorter than most of the others, without anything like the same number of characters, and a certain depth is missing. But although the basic story – a man in a family publishing business who lost the use of his right arm and leg as a young child marries the doctor Dorothy, and after several years she is killed by a tree falling on their house but then returns from the dead to visit him – stretches crediblity almost to the limit, we must remember that this is Tyler and she somehow manages to carry it off.

 

The man (whom we've met in several different guises before) is Aaron Woolcott, who is only too pleased to escape his smothering mother and unmarried elder sister Nandina for a life with his non-domestic, hardworking wife while he half-pretends to edit tedious vanity publications, and also publishes 'Beginner's' books, a more upmarket version of Dummies.

 

His world collapses at the same time as the tree collapses on his wife, who collapses under the weight of the upset television. As the house has collapsed too, he must soon bow to the inevitable and take refuge in his sister's house. His bereavement has to take its course, and to smooth him through the process his dead wife makes several appearances. No one else can see her, although she usually talks to him but disappears when anyone else appears: there's not any suggestion that Aaron's going mad, rather this is shown as something the reader just has to, well, accept.

 

As builder Gil gets to work on the damaged house, his relationship with Nandina grows and he starts staying over: Aaron feels de trop and goes back to his almost repaired house. Soon, his wife's appearances cease and Aaron takes it in his stride. From the time of Aaron's wife's death to near the end of the novel we gradually learn that the marriage had been far from perfect:

 

'What I do remember is that familiar, weary, helpless feeling, the feeling that we were confined in some kind of rodent cage, wrestling together doggedly, neither one of us ever winning.'

 

This is almost the claustrophobic marital/familial battle context that many of Tyler's protagonists find themselves in, although by Dorothy's final appearance there seems to be a kind of resolution.

 

I'm not certain that the happy ending of Aaron's second marriage and fatherhood is one that I'd particularly have wished for though: it's a bit too neat.

My other Anne Tyler reviews are below:

 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)

Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)

 

The Clock Winder is Anne Tyler's fourth novel, and the year it was published the New York Times had very little to say about it, just that it lacked substance. In a much later review in the Washington Post in 2003 – 'The Clock Winder: A Look Back to What Makes Anne Tyler Tick' – Jonathan Yardley is much more appreciative of it. And interestingly, he mentions a book I wasn't aware of – The Writer on Her Work (New York: Norton, c. 1980), edited by Janet Sternberg and containing an essay by Tyler titled 'Still Just Writing', in which she says that she's hurt when people say she chooses only to write about 'bizarre or eccentric people'. She goes on say that this is not a choice because 'even the most ordinary person [...] will turn out to have something unusual at his center.' Unusual? Well, yes, I can see that, but like most of her books The Clock Winder is (and I'm not ashamed of repeating myself ad nauseam) a world away from the milk and cookie world many believe she inhabits.

However, by coincidence, milk and cookies are literally what Mrs Emerson offers the young Elizabeth Abbott at the beginning of the book, after she does the widow a favor. But there isn't a great deal of cosiness in the rest of the novel, which depicts a very dysfunctional family with people behaving very oddly.

Mrs Emerson has had seven children, all of whom are odd, but some of whom are odder than others, such as Timothy, who kills himself earlier on in the presence of Elizabeth, and whose mentally disturbed twin brother sends her four letters in which he threatens to kill her. Most people would have been really spooked by this and called the cops, but Elizabeth doesn't tell anyone, doesn't take it seriously, and a few years later Andrew shoots her, although she's lucky to escape with a graze.

From this, it's clear that Elizabeth too is odd, and no less so for joining Dommie up the aisle only to say 'I don't'. And she doesn't just say this because she had second thoughts about that marriage proposal by Matthew, another of Mrs Emerson's sons who happens to be so persistent in chasing Elizabeth that he too seems a little spooky.

In short, and as Yardley notes, all of the characters in this novel have something odd about them, although we don't learn anything about Mrs Emerson's son Peter until the end of the book, which is in 1970, ten years after it began. For the first time in three years, Peter goes back to Baltimore to see his mother, accompanied by his wife P. J., although no one even knows he's married. Elizabeth (who's now called Gillespie and finally married to Matthew) shows P. J. their room, and they're just about set to have a meal when P. J. (alone with Peter) throws a funny and slips away quietly. Shortly afterwards, Peter slips out quietly too, finds P. J. and away they drive, back to New Jersey.

This could only be Anne Tyler. She never fails.

My other Tyler reviews are below:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)

Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)

Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)

A major theme of Anne Tyler's Morgan's Passing is the gulf between appearance and reality, which runs everywhere in the book, but especially in the protagonist Morgan Gower, who regularly looks at his fancy dress wardrobe and tries to decide who he's going to be that particular day: a soldier, a sailor, a river boat gambler, a whaling ship harpooner? Morgan lives in chaos – largely the chaos of his own identity – with wife Bonny and his seven daughters.

There are many interesting sentences and phrases here, such as in this description of Morgan's everyday reality: 'He felt he was riding something choppy and violent, fighting to keep his balance, smiling beatifically and trying not to blink'. Generically, he seems to come from the same cast as Jeremy Pauling in Celestial Navigation, only instead of suffering from geographical dyslexia he has what might be described as existential dyslexia. When Kate, his youngest, plucks his hat off, is she removing the guise and allowing him to see himself in a truer aspect, are the real father and real daughter meeting each other briefly? If so, maybe that's why he fleetingly thinks of having yet another baby, perpetuating the chaos but paradoxically holding things together more: is that wallowing in turmoil, or fending off an unknown enemy, or both at the same time? And some people – Tyler included – see her work as milk and cookies? I really don't understand.

Then there are Tyler's usual social dysfunctions, like Morgan's father killed himself during Morgan's adolescence for no apparent reason; Morgan's sister Brindel (who is autistic, perhaps) lives with them because she split up from her husband, and although she later leaves the family for an earlier lover, she leaves him too to re-join the Gowers as the former lover is only in love with her former self: how she seemed then. It's no accident that after Morgan sees a movie it doesn't seem realistic because 'Everyone had been so sure of what everyone else was going to do [...]. Didn't B ever happen instead of A, in these people's lives?'.

Morgan (who somehow gets away with not seeming to be as spooky as he at first appears) stalks Emily and her husband Leon, who seem to live an antithetical existence to his, their lives seeming to be mapped out, although their happy marriage is not as happy as it appears.

The Gower family, it perhaps goes without saying, are bad drivers, and there is the occasional hint of absurdity on the surface, which on reflection isn't as absurd as it seems:

'"Do you like Tolstoy?"
"Oh yes, we have it in leather."'.

Eventually, Morgan gets Emily – a girl who's old enough to be his daughter – pregnant, and in so doing splits up both of the families. And the title comes from a personal notice in the local paper that Bonny rather disturbingly inserts, about the death of Morgan, only in reality she knows he's very much alive.

This is one of the funniest (and at the same time one of the most disturbing) novels of Tyler's I've read so far, making it my fourteenth and still counting.

The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)

It's slightly odd how this looks like a YA cover, but then this is a 1980s edition, and I suppose many covers at that time were intended to look breezy. But can an Anne Tyler novel ever be called breezy?

The funeral at the beginning here predicts Breathing Lessons; the painful funeral meal predicts many other painful meals in Tyler's novels; Ansel's antisocial behavior predicts that of many other Tyler eccentrics; Simon's flight from home predicts so many other flights, but especially that of the child Luke Tull in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Most of all, the awful effect of child death predicts The Accidental Tourist, only here it affects a greater number of people.

I really don't understand those who find Tyler's novels comforting. Adam Mars-Jones describes her books (admittedly when compared with Philip Roth's) as offering 'milk and cookies', and even Tyler herself to some extent agrees with that. So why do I find them so disturbing? Celestial Navigation, for instance, is a nightmare and was a nightmare for Tyler to write, but is that novel such an exception? For me, Tyler is constantly underlining how difficult it is to live in society: her families are often prisons, and it's hardly surprising that so many of her characters try to break free. But then, of course, the mind is a prison too. Take one sentence in The Tin Can Tree, in which the narrator is inside Joan's head, and which includes the word that prefigures the adjective in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: 'Everything she saw made her homesick, but not for any home she's ever had.' That 'homesick'* is crucial to Tyler's fiction, and the above sentence is highly revealing: many of Tyler's characters live the outsider's pain, and alienation seems to be the norm.

*'Homesick' clearly has a double meaning, and also refers to being sick of home.

The links below are to a Guardian interview by Lisa Allardice, and to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
'Anne Tyler: A Life's Work' – Lisa Allardice's recent Guardian Review interview
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)

Orville Prescott was the chief book reviewer for the New York Times for many years. In 1964 he concluded his review of Anne Tyler's first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, by saying that it is a 'fine book' by a 'rarely talented' novelist. And yet Tyler – before she gave up giving interviews – told Paul Binding (in Separate Countries: A Literary Journey through the American South (1979)) that she 'virtually disown[ed]' her first two novels. Tyler did give a very rare interview in London last month to Lisa Allardice, in which she extends the number of disowned books to her first four: she says she'd like to destroy them as she didn't know what she was doing, that she was 'just finding [her] way' (Guardian Review, 14 April 2012). Fortunately, those books are out there and no matter what Tyler may think of them, they provide the serious reader with an very valuable insight into the early workings of the writer.

If Morning Ever Comes doesn't involve a great deal of action or a large number of characters and the main story can be summed up easily: student Ben Joe briefly returns from Columbia University, NYC, to his mother and sisters in smalltown North Carolina after he's learned his sister Joanne has left her husband Gary, and he goes back to university a few days later with his old flame Shelley, whom he will shortly marry. Themes that will become common in Tyler's later novels are there: walking out on a relationship, the importance of the family, the conflict between reflection and impulse, the world of dreams, familiarity versus novelty, emotional constipation, etc. There's even the touch of pedantry sometimes used by Tyler's characters, in this case when Ben Joe corrects Tessie's 'somthing' on the kitchen blackboard-cum-bulletin board.

But I can't see any reason why Tyler should want to 'disown' this book: it may not be among her best, but it's certainly not a bad first novel.

The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)

Reviewing Anne Tyler's Digging to America in The New York Times here, Michiko Kakutani finds the coincidence of the two separate adoptions of Korean babies at the same time, arriving on a plane to Baltimore, is 'contrived in the extreme', and certainly it's glaringly evident that the baby contrivance is designed to bring the Iranian Yazdan family and the American Donaldson family together, serving as the sine qua non of the plot.

OK, fine, but what I find truly impossible to believe is that the mother Bitsy Donaldson couldn't find an image of a pacifier (British English: baby's dummy) online: this book is a few years (although only a few) old, but I keyed in 'pacifier', clicked on 'images' and found over 6,000,000 pacifiers. (The internet tempts you to do some very strange things at times.) There's a whole chapter on pacifiers in Digging to America too, culminating in masses of them being disastrously launched into space on balloons.

Tyler, of course, is noted for the absurd, so her previous novels perhaps don't render this event quite as surprising as it might have been. The pacifier launch happens at the time of a get-together between the families, and very often the novel seems a little like a long (even occasionally tediously long) string of social occasions, rather similar to  Back When We Were Grownups in this respect.

The blurb on the front flap says: '[Digging to America is] about belonging and otherness, about outsiders and insiders, pride and prejudice, young love and unexpected old love, families and the impossibility of ever getting it right, about striving for connection and goodness against all the odds...'. I agree, although I think this paints a rather darker picture than this novel gives out: here, things are very much softer than Tyler's other novels, differences exist but are often smoothed over if not positively worshipped, and life in general is not anything like as difficult as in most of her other novels.

I get the idea that Tyler wanted to fictionalize her married life with an Iranian doctor and their children, although any resemblance between the characters in this novel and any persons in real life, of course, is purely coincidental.

 

The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)

Pearl Tull is an old woman who's dying, although she doesn't do so until the end of the ninth section of this ten-section novel, because the narrative of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant moves through a long flashback.

One day, itinerant salesman Beck tells his wife Pearl that he's leaving her and their three children – Cody (14), Ezra (11) and Jenny (9) – and tells her that he won't be coming back. Pearl doesn't understand, and she never will, but mother and children remain in Baltimore just carrying on. As Beck only sends her $50 a month, she adds to this by working as a cashier, although she never says anything to anyone – not even the kids – about her husband's desertion.

The second section, 'Teaching the Cat to Yawn', is seen through the point of view of Cody, who is the family prankster, the teenager with a bad reputation, a petty thief, he takes fabricated photos to make his brother look bad, he's a smoker, and he cheats at monopoly to boot. He also sees himself as an outsider to Baltimore, a person who's not accepted.

The third section belongs to Jenny. It begins when Cody is away at college, and Ezra, just before going off to fight in Korea, asks her, in his absence, to visit two town outsiders: Mrs Scarlatti, whose restaurant he's been working in, who lives on her own, and whose son has been killed in action; and Josiah Payson, the scarecrow people make fun of because they think he's a dummy, although he may well be brighter than Jenny and Ezra.

So Jenny and her mother Pearl have the house to themselves for a short time, but they communicate by not communicating: 'Their talk was small talk, little dibs and dabs of things, safely skating over whatever might lie beneath.' But Ezra soon returns, discharged because of his sleepwalking. (Incidentally, it's amazing how many of Tyler's characters figuratively sleepwalk through life.)

Medical student Jenny grows into a beauty and ill-advisedly marries student prodigy and socially inept control freak Harley Baines, Cody becomes an efficiency expert, and Ezra moves into a partnership with Mrs Scarlatti in the restaurant trade, going on to inherit the business.

The fifth section resumes Cody's story and lingers on his annoyance with the 'sissy pale goody-goody Ezra', who captivates the girls without trying, and without even noticing, as he'd prefer to play his recorder: the good-brother bad-brother scenario unfolds through adulthood, culminating here in Cody stealing Ezra's girl Ruth. (And I may be wrong, but surely this is the first time in the ten Tyler books I've read that a person uses such a strong word as 'shit'; later in the novel, she uses 'bastard' and 'crap': gosh!). This section highlights the dysfunctions of the family once again, and dinners (where people are socially captive – a favorite trick of Tyler's) frequently tend to accentuate faultlines.

The 'Beaches on the Moon' section continues the depiction of the damaged family, with Cody becoming increasingly suspicious of (even paranoid about) Ezra in relation to Ruth and his son Luke, and his consequent movement away from Pearl.

Cody has an accident at work and becomes nastier still, even to the point of claiming that Luke is Ruth and Ezra's child. What can Luke do? Well, the very thing that Tyler's characters are noted for – he takes flight. But as he's only 14 years old, Cody soon brings him back. (For Tyler, road trips (along with the dinners mentioned before) are excellent ways to bring long-nurtured ill feelings to the fore, but here Luke's hitchhike is an opportunity for the narrator to introduce light relief through eccentric characters.)

In the final section, Beck returns on the day of his wife Pearl's funeral and (at dinner!) sees what he thinks is 'one of those great big, jolly, noisy, rambling [...] families', but big bad Cody (who of course has his good points too) tells him it's not like that, that hardly any of the kids are related to him, that Cody hasn't seen these people in years, that the family is 'in particles, torn apart, torn all over the place', and that his mother was an excessively violent witch. Yes, Anne Tyler is playing happy families again.

This is one of the best of her novels I've read so far.The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)

When Delia and Joel are talking about the absence of words to express subtleties, Joel regrets that there's only one word to describe the various hues of freckles. He is of course expressing his love, his desire, for Delia, but in a tangential, restrained, although highly eloquent manner. This is typical of the whispered art of Anne Tyler: there is never any mention of penises or clitorides, vaginas, or ever nipples.

Sometimes, however, her restraint, her deliberate avoidance of saying things seems to fall flat, becomes unrealistic, particularly with her characters' use of interjections: expressions of disgust, anger, frustration, are always covered over by words like 'Cripes!', 'Hot dog!', 'Jiminy!', 'Gosh!', 'Sheesh!', 'Compost happens!', etc, all quaint euphemisms that have a hollow ring, that in no way match the gravity of the situation. Yes, this is (most probably) the early nineties and still Dr Samuel Grinstead rebukes his son for saying (gasp!) 'for Christ's sake!'. Compared with movie language (and we've moved light years away from the shock of the word 'damn' in Gone with the Wind), Tyler's novels are stuck in a distant past as far as interjections go. (Perversely, this can be as charming as it is annoying.)

And yet she's no wilting, schoolmarmish writer, she can be (and indeed often is) caustic, and her characters can lash out at the aural anesthesia of smalltalk or the safety valves of religion that automatically annihilate any attempts to delve into troubling, complex thoughts by their soothing, readymade, robotic reflexes.

Living with Sam and the kids, Delia sometimes felt 'like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family's edges', and certainly the bizarre newspaper article that announces her disappearance and that serves as an introduction to Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years strongly indicates someone almost incidental to the lives of her family: neither her husband nor her children can decide for sure on her height, weight, the color of her eyes or what she was wearing. So who can be surprised that, without a word, she has walked out of their lives. After about a year she walks into the life of Joel and his son Noah, but then in a few months walks out again, back into Sam's. I suppose I saw the end coming, but I can't say I'm too happy with it: so like other characters of Tyler's, was Delia trying on another life, or stepping outside of time a while? Sheesh!

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)

Elements of the Southern Gothic are plentiful in Anne Tyler's Earthly Possessions. Charlotte says of her grotesquely obese mother: 'In some way, she'd grown separate from the rest of the town – had no friends whatsoever.' Added to that, her father 'Hung about as if he didn't own his own body [...] he looked like an empty suit of clothes'. And her mother said she didn't believe Charlotte was her real daughter, thought there'd been a 'mix-up' at the hospital. As a child, Charlotte's two principal fears were that she'd be rejected because she was not the real daughter, or that if she was the real daughter she wouldn't ever be able to escape.

Once again with Tyler, in this novel there's a statement that normalizes the abnormal, or abnormalizes the normal: 'Maybe all families, even the most normal-looking, were as queer as ours once you got up close to them.' What do you expect: this is Anne Tyler, who specializes in dysfunctional families and the weirdness of everyday life, who paints a world where the bizarre is an ordinary part of living. Several of Tyler's novels begin where a person walks out of a relationship, but in Earthly Possessions Charlotte Emory not only walks away from Saul to draw out money out of a bank for her escape, but at the same time walks into the clutches of bankrobber (and bad driver) Jake, whose almost consenting hostage she becomes, which begins an absurd road trip into Florida involving a mismatched couple, turning into a mismatched trio.

All this is told in two alternating first person narratives in the past tense by Charlotte, which are in fifteen sections – from the bank robbery through to the end of the road trip, and from Charlotte's early life up to the end of the road trip where the narratives converge – with a sixteenth section as a presentday coda. But Charlotte is still stuck in her past life, and things still happen to her without her being able to make anything happen for herself.

A criminal driving to Florida, a cat in a car? Isn't there just a teensie sniff of Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' here? Tylerized, of course.The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Ann Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)

This is the story of Macon Leary, whose wife Sarah leaves him not very long after their son Ethan has been shot through the head for no reason. He eventually gets together with Muriel, then goes back to Sarah, then back with Muriel again. In between we meet Macon's siblings, learning about their missing compasses, and about their absurd reluctance to use the telephone.

The absurd raises its head early in The Accidental Tourist, and page three plunges us into almost Beckettian territory when the Learys cut short a week at the beach to drive back to Baltimore, and on the way Sarah recalls saying to her husband, 'Macon, now that Ethan's dead I sometimes wonder if there's any point to life', and Macon had replied: 'Honey, to tell the truth, it never seemed to me there was all that much point to begin with'. But then, as a writer of travel guides who hates travel, absurdity for Macon more or less comes with the territory.

Macon's idea of smooth travel is being at no risk of communicating with anyone while traveling, of making the journey seem seamless. Books can serve as protection against strangers, and he has for years taken on his professionally necessary travels the novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young, which the Dalkey Archive Press describes as a book 'of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare', adding that 'in prose of extraordinary richness [Young] tests the nature of her characters—and the nature of reality'. It also favorably compares the novel to Melville's Moby-Dick.

Macon, along with his two brothers and his sister — and also Tyler herself — all suffer from 'geographic dyslexia', and it now seems to me that probably Macon is the character the author has said she 'donated' this affliction to rather than Jeremy Pauling in Celestial Navigation (see my post here. Nevertheless, the differences and the similarities between Macon and Jeremy are very striking. Jeremy has a very advanced case of geographical dyslexia, which manifests itself in an inability to step beyond the block, or even answer the door or the phone, without experiencing some (often very profound) degree of anxiety, whereas Macon travels the world but at the same time screens himself from it by essentially ignoring it, by retreating into habit, cosiness, the familiar. As the title The Accidental Tourist suggests, the journey is peripheral to the purpose, just a necessary but loathesome burden between two points. Macon abstracts, or absents, himself from unfamiliar aspects of the outside world as a coping mechanism. It's significant, after his temporarily incapacitating fall, that he wonders if he's engineered it so that he can return to the comfort zone of his siblings.

When Macon's sister Rose thinks that she doesn't know a family more conventional than the Learys, the narrator, responding through Macon's thoughts, says: 'This was perfectly true, and yet in some odd way it wasn't. Macon couldn't explain it.' I feel much the same way about Tyler's novels, which seem normal on the surface, but lurking underneath are all kinds of strange creatures.

The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)

A little like Barnaby Gaitlin in A Patchwork Planet, Liam Pennywell in Noah's Compass is a loser. He's divorced of course, and his first wife killed herself not long after giving birth. And his grade-school just made him redundant. And he's downsized his appartment, thinking perhaps he can afford to retire at the age of sixty. And then he wakes up in hospital to another loss: his memory after being hit on the head by a burglar during the night.

After recovering, he feels his life is shriveling up 'like one of those mouse carcasses you find beneath a radiator'. And when suddenly the chance of transforming his life comes, with the 38-year-old Eunice who loves him and whom he loves, but he loses out again because she's lied and has a husband, and because his conscience won't allow him to accept it if she leaves him for him.

In a sense he makes himself the loser, one of Tyler's self-destructive characters, and the narrator italicizes the aftermath feelings: 'I am not especially unhappy, but I don't see any particular reason to go on living'.

Nevertheless, he continues.The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

Rebecca Davitch is having a picnic with her family on North Fork River, Maryland, celebrating the engagement of her youngest stepdaughter NoNo. The narrator says 'The Davitches' cars circled the meadow like covered wagons braced for attack'. But as this is Anne Tyler, most readers only vaguely acquainted with her work will be aware that any attacks are more likely to come from internal snipers than Red Indians. And sure enough there is some criticism of NoNo's fiancé Barry. And there's criticism of Barry's extremely shy son Peter, whose mother left them to join a group of Buddhists, rather similar to the way in which Joe's wife Tina had deserted him and their three daughters (of whom NoNo is one) with a view to being a singer in New York.

This is essentially Rebecca's story. She's a social organizer (continuing the job of her husband Joe, who died in a car crash as he's another of Tyer's bad drivers, and whose father killed himself), she prepares functions and makes sure everyone at least is giving the appearance of being happy. But is she that kind of person? As a young girl, a little like Peter, she 'tended to stay on the fringe of things, observings things from a distance, and she noticed that what she observed was often outside the normal frame of vision'.

It's not outside the normal frame of vision of Anne Tyler's characters to impulsively walk out of things, and that's just what the young Rebecca did, she walked out of the arms of the virginal Will, out of college without graduating, and into the arms of the less-than-virginal and much older Joe.

The older Rebecca starts to imagine what kind of life she'd have had if she'd stuck with the academic Will, who is now a university professor. She begins to see this lost life as her 'true real life' and the one she's been living as her 'fake real life'. The I that she now is sees her past I as a she, and Rebecca wonders if she can change that she back to I, and vice versa. But does she really want to do that, even if it's possible?

Many things, big and small, keep recurring in Anne Tyler's work: the inability of people to communciate with each other, alienation, the self-destruction of the family, the self-destruction of the individual, the importance of memory, celebration, the corrosion of time, the minutiae of everyday life seen through social, psychological and linguistic tics, impulsiveness/prudence, acceptance/refusal, the tyranny of the telephone, food as metaphor, the absurd, chance, the 'trying on' of different lives, the playoff between dream and reality, Ann Landers, etc. There's happiness too, but not an abundance of it. There are never any pat conclusions, and all her work is shot through with the difficulty of the business of living. When her grandchild Abdul is born, Rebecca imagines his thoughts, which might well be a mirror of her own, or our own:

'Who are you? What kind of people have I ended up with, here? How am I going to like living on this planet?'

The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)

'I just can't stand to be one of those artificial fathers [...] with those busywork visits to zoos and smalltalk suppers at McDonald's', says Jesse in Breathing Lessons, but that's what Barnaby Gaitlin is (only it's a walk in the park and burger and fries at Little Pete's) in A Patchwork Planet, and the novel begins with him waiting at Baltimore railroad station for the 10:10 to Thirtieth Street Station, Philadelphia to spend the day with Opal, his daughter by his ex-wife Natalie. Barnaby believes he gives Opal 'a sense of whatchamacallit. Connection', and one of Anne Tyler's principal concerns is connection, or the lack of it.

On one occasion, after Barnaby's mother slams the phone down on him because he says she looks better without her hair dyed, he says: 'Just because we were related didn't mean we were any good at understanding each other.'

Even the most basic form of communication can fail here. Grace Glynn, a client of Barnaby's, mishears his name as 'Bartleby', which is a nice touch: the black sheep of the family, the social code-breaker seen as Melville's anarchist.

Sometimes a kind of claustrophobia can result from social difficulties. On the journey home from Thanksgiving dinner with Barnaby's relatives, Sophia can't understand why he (a poorly paid helper) didn't accept his mother's offer of taking back the large loan he's repaid, and he can't understand why she won't pick up the money Sophia's left at her aunt's in the mistaken belief that Barnaby stole it from her. He says: 'I grew extremely conscious of how closed in we were.'

The novel also begins and ends with Barnaby's sentence 'I am a man you can trust', the second sentence being written in a note he's written in an envelope with Sophia's money, which he imagines her opening in Philadelphia station. The sentence is preceded by 'Sophia, you never did realize'. 'Realize', of course, is very similar to 'understand', but I'm not at all convinced that Barnaby understands, as he still seems reluctant to relinquish the self-destruct button.The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)

Ira and Maggie Moran are driving from Baltimore, Maryland, to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania, to the funeral of Max, the husband of Serena, Maggie's longtime friend, but on the way Maggie orders Ira to stop the car as she's getting out. Leaving Ira for good, she is, she'll go back to the truck stop, ask the waitress if there are any rooms nearby and she'll find a new job, but, needless to say, Ira comes back so they can continue the journey to Deer Lick.

We're in the realm of the absurd, although Anne Tyler has a way of making the absurd, or the dysfunctional, seem normal. Serena throws Maggie and Ira out because she caught them in her bedroom, and then on the journey back Maggie (a bad driver) makes a deliberately incorrect sign to a bad driver that his wheel is falling off, but she's penitent when she sees he's old and black, so persuades Ira to go back and tell the man that there's in reality nothing wrong with his car, but he believes her signal and thinks there is, and even convinces Maggie that there is. Consequently, Ira takes the driver (Daniel Otis) to the garage to see his nephew Lamont, but they have to wait because he's out.

And during the wait Maggie learns that Daniel has – like so many of Tyler's characters – walked out of his home, but this time walked out because his wife Duluth is angry with him for something he did in her dream.

During the wait we also learn that Ira's father Sam had interfered with his son's dreams, and this begins one of Tyler's digressions, this time in which the narrator fills in a little backstory about Ira. Ira is from a family in which his (unnamed) mother is a religious obsessive and is never hungry so never bothers with food, meaning that eating has to be organized by his father as his two much older sisters also have considerable communication problems: Dorrie is mentally handicapped and Junie can never leave the house to buy anything (strong shades of Jeremy Pauling in Celestial Navigation). But then the father 'implod[es]', as Ira puts it, he just gives up his business and most things else, so Ira has to ditch his dreams of medical school to take over the family business and become a full-time parent figure. Like the daughter Lindy Anton in The Amateur Marriage, Ira despairs: 'Ah, God, I have been trapped with these people all my life and I am never going to be free'.

People have difficulty communicating in Anne Tyler's world, and third parties may feel they have to intervene, or be persuaded into intervening, in an attempt to avoid disaster or to mend the broken. Little things, seemingly insignificant, can be all-important, can make or break. But then, hell can be other people, in which case no amount of outside help works.

(Careful to use the double inverted commas, I Googled "Anne Tyler" with "dysfunctional families" and came up with 2860 hits. It figures.)

The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)