Saccharine? No, it’s another masterclass by our greatest chronicler of family life
from family life. Quite the opposite: the feuds, the hurts, the let-downs, the secrets, the misapprehensions, the fallouts… are all chronicled with eerie precision. But, beneath them all, there is an underlying feel of hope so unusual in today’s fiction that it can be dismissed as saccharine.
Equally, Tyler is unfashionably empathetic towards men. She often creates men whose hopes have been dashed, or who have problems connecting to other people, or who, quite simply, prefer to talk about cars or home maintenance over anything more personal, but she treats them with dignity. ‘I am very comfortable writing as a man,’ she said in a recent interview, ‘and I think that’s because I had really good men in my life. They made me comfortable and I thought, “OK, they’re not so different from me.”’ How many other contemporary women novelists would be bold enough to say the same?
Having read all her novels, I often find it hard, in retrospect, to distinguish one from another. They all chronicle characters who might pass unnoticed in their own neighbourhoods, but whose hopes and fears are universal.
Perhaps they will eventually come to be seen as one vast, panoramic portrait of life in one particular place, at one particular time, as accurate and resonant as similar series by Balzac or Trollope.
The great Alan Bennett once offered his own variation on Tolstoy’s gloomy aphorism about families. ‘Every family has a secret,’ he suggested, ‘And its secret is that it is not like other families.’
Tyler also recognises the power of secrecy within the family. The key couple, Robin and Mercy, never quite break up, but Mercy rents a studio in town and gradually moves into it, and away from home. Neither lets on to their children that this is the case. ‘The greatest accomplishment of
Robin’s life was: not a single one of his children guessed that Mercy wasn’t living at home any more… It would kill them. They would be devastated.’
Of course, the children guessed it years ago but have never talked about it. When Robin boasts to his middle-aged daughter Lily that her mother has chided him into visiting a doctor, ‘His shyly boastful tone filled Lily with pity. He was so proud to have a wife who cared about his wellbeing.’
This is just one of many instances of the emotional complexities in this beautiful novel of family life as it unfolds over the years. ‘Time passing is a plot,’ Anne Tyler has said.
In this particular family, the members live separate lives, so much so that the youngest generation barely recognise each other, but they all have something in common, each generation carrying whispers of the ones that went before.