Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959.
“A quietly subversive novel, tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging.” - The New York Times Book Review From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Spool of Blue Thread-a funny, joyful, brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one Baltimore family’s foibles, from a boyfriend with a red Chevy in the 1950s up to a longed-for reunion with a grandchild.She is a master of both language and storytelling of throwing open the windows of unsuspecting families and spotlighting their flaws, paradoxes and beauty with panache and poignancy. The power of Tyler’s prose often lies in the silences and the gaps: she is not a loquacious writer, and she trusts her reader to texturize what is unstated but assumed. Their fracture is almost organic a split that takes generations to finally acknowledge, but evidence of which is pockmarked throughout their history, the most conspicuous being Mercy’s decision to move into her art studio, away from the family home still occupied by Robin, her husband, and father to their three children.ĭecades are condensed into Tyler’s 250 pages, each chapter encompassing a different member of the family in a new decade, opening in 2010, then spooling backwards to the 1950s before proceeding onwards to the present day. But the splintering of the Garrett family doesn’t originate from a seismic event there is no great cataclysm that disentangles their familial ties. This one is somewhere in the middle, which means it’s definitely worth your time.įrench Braid is a novel of unraveled domesticity. There is no such thing as a bad Anne Tyler novel: they exist on a sliding scale that wavers between good and great. It is incredible to think that she has been examining middle-and-working-class Baltimorean families for almost 60 years and is still able to glean the tiniest, subtlest observations that bring her characters to life, and contribute to their authentic veneer. I marvel at her ability to recycle familiar themes and reconstitute them. My relationship with Anne Tyler seems to me like a fine wine - it improves with age.
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