Tyler’s gifts are still ticking in ‘Clock Dance’

Author’s familiar themes explored with fresh eyes

Family is the way some of us understand the world. Not the self, not society – but the little malleable confederation that lies between the two.

Anne Tyler, one of this country’s great artists, has spent 50 years and more than 20 novels on the subject, her beautiful, understated, humane tales so similar in shape and voice that taken together they have come to seem like a subtle and sublime mania, the author explaining the same idea to herself over and over again, marveling anew each time at its mysteries.

“Clock Dance,” her latest novel (Knopf, 292 pp., ★★★g), concerns Willa, a typical Tyler protagonist, which is to say decent, wry, middle class, and basically bewildered. The book begins with three long episodes from her life (Tyler has been experimenting more with jumps in time recently), before the narrative slips into the present.

Willa is living in Arizona when she hears that her son’s ex-girlfriend in Baltimore has been shot in the leg. Can Willa come and take care of the woman’s daughter? Nobody else is around. The answer should of course be “no,” and of course Willa, full of indistinct yearning, says “yes.”

In the shabby-respectable neighborhood where her son’s ex lives, she immediately finds a surprising sense of community. There’s her non-granddaughter most importantly, a precise, pensive, tender girl, but also a modest doctor, a shy teenager, a dog named Airplane. Willa’s real family – husband, sons – are cavalier to the point of cruelty with her; these new people need her, and set about rescuing her, in typical Tylerian fashion, from her own manners.

Willa’s son Sean, for example, barely makes time to see her. Nor does he offer to pick her up before dinner, and Willa explains to his ex-girlfriend that she hasn’t asked – she’d hoped he might offer.

“But why just hope?” her new acquaintance asks. “Why do you go at things so slantwise?”

Tyler loves to force her characters into direct confrontation with their unspoken hopes, away from their slantwise instincts. She’s an artful symbolist (take the running family card game in “Breathing Lessons,” for instance) and in Willa’s case her magnanimously abandoned gift for linguistics comes to seem increasingly meaningful as she finds, in Baltimore, her own speech.

Here and there in “Clock Dance” the paint shows through – secondary characters are wispy, some of the beats a little pat. But it’s a powerful, stirring work. Tyler has lost none of the inspired grace of her prose, nor her sad, frank humor, nor her limitless sympathy for women who ask for little and get less.

I often find myself reading this author’s books in fits and starts at the beginning, then rushing through their second halves in heedless absorption, and I’ve finally decided it’s because almost all of her stories begin in sorrow and end in hope.

Again and again Tyler asks the same thing: What was all that business, all those parents, children, brothers, sisters? What did it mean? For Willa, the question arrives early in life, and the answer late. But it comes.

Charles Finch is the author of “The Woman in the Water.”