We have their view of themselves as a family, and we are also given some history which they don't know themselves. At the beginning, we are given Abby's point of view as she thinks about her most difficult son, Denny. Abby is in her seventies and her four children are grown up with families of their own - although she and her husband, Red, don't know much about what Denny is up to, and this lack of knowledge worries them a lot. The rest of their children live not far away from their childhood home in Baltimore.
When Abby starts to get slips in her memory the siblings decide that something must be done, and so one son, nicknamed Stem, the youngest, moves into his parents' house with his wife and children. So the house is full again, and shortly afterwards, Denny moves in too. Denny is a person who is permanently outside, looking in and feeling resentful, because he can't feel comfortable "at home". It's just a quality he's born with. (One of his "friends" calls him," Oy, Shitwank!" so Anne Tyler got there first with that joke.)
The thing about the book is that you get so quickly drawn in to this family and their conversations and you feel close to them.
Abby is the person who holds her family together. She has amazing skill at peace-making and smoothing over, and her love for her husband is very strong. Anne Tyler is always examining the woman's role - not just in the family, but also in the neighbourhood or community, and also in shaping American life, in making the tone of it kind, inclusive and pleasant, which capitalism in the raw is not. In this book, Abby is a retired social worker, which is a perfect vocation for a Tyler woman - she used to spread her energetic kindness through the neighbourhood in a formalised way while many of the Tyler "moms" do this unofficially.
The daughters in the novel are career women - and one has a hands-on role in the family constructions business - so feminism has not passed Anne Tyler by - but we never see the world through Jeannie's eyes as we do through Abby's.
Anne Tyler's mother was a social worker! and her father was a Chemistry professor.
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| It looks as though the Duchess of Cornwall is a fan. |
Her stories help readers to feel less alone, because she depicts her characters in all kinds of difficult circumstances; sudden bereavements and accidents, for example, feeling a sense of displacement, or walking away from the family in order to see if anything better can be found. Sometimes she seems not to know where to end a novel, but other Tyler readers disagree with me and find her endings perfect.
One fan is Craig Brown: this is from his review in the Mail on Sunday:
How does she do it? How does she construct such a complex narrative out of such simple sentences?
How does she manage to give her readers the impression they have actually been living in a given household, overhearing her characters talk?
How does she capture so accurately the peculiar ebbs and flows of married life, of family life, of life itself?
Her writing style seems close to styleless. She writes ‘he said’ and ‘she said’. She eschews fancy words like ‘eschew’. She doesn’t go in for adverbs or ornament.
Her books are full of families talking about humdrum things like doing the washing-up, or going shopping or what’s for lunch, yet they are somehow more gripping than the paciest transcontinental thriller.
*****
Tyler has always been interested in misfits, and the effect they have on the rest of their family. Here the misfit is their third child, Denny, who should, by rights, be the most fortunate.
‘Teachers phoned Abby repeatedly. “Could you come in for a talk about Denny as soon as possible, please.”’ As an adult, Denny disappears for months on end, and harbours obscure resentments.
‘It seemed jobs kept disappointing him, as did business partners and girlfriends and entire geographical regions.’
******
There are many other themes in this novel – themes of old age and decrepitude, sibling rivalry, the consequences of a sudden death, the tales that define families and echo down generations, the basic human tension between security and anxiety, moving on and staying put.
Yet these themes are never underlined, emerging naturally from the interaction of the characters.
And Tyler is the most natural of novelists. Gore Vidal once claimed that he could read any modern novel and tell you which films the novelist had watched in his youth. But I’m quite sure he would have drawn a blank with Tyler.
I know of no other novelist who draws so directly from real life, and whose work remains so uncontaminated by the shortcuts and clichés of television and Hollywood.
A Spool Of Blue Thread may be her best yet, though, to be honest, this is what I always tend to say after reading the latest Anne Tyler.
I’ve now read it twice, and I may well read it again. But still the question remains: how does she do it?
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2941112/Anne-Tyler-Spool-Blue-Thread-review-Craig-Brown.html#ixzz3yYsttF8v
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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2941112/Anne-Tyler-Spool-Blue-Thread-review-Craig-Brown.html#ixzz3yYsttF8v
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