Tyler's latest excavates ordinary life
French Braid seems is entirely familiar and that's just perfect for author's fans
French Braid Anne Tyler Knopf
Everything about Anne Tyler's 24th novel, French Braid, is immediately recognizable to her fans.
The story offers such a complete checklist of the author's usual motifs and themes that it could serve as the Guidebook to Anne Tyler in the Wild. The insular Baltimore family, the quirky occupations, the special foods. There are times when such familiarity might feel tiresome. But we're not in one of those times. Indeed, given today's slate of horror and chaos, the rich melody of French Braid offers the comfort of a beloved hymn.
The Garretts are a classic Tyler tribe: responsible, middle-class, kind but flinty. Robin and Mercy have inherited the family plumbing supply store. They're the parents of three blue-eyed children: two teenage daughters — one responsible, one boy-crazy — and a seven-year-old son.
In 1959, Robin finally takes his family on their first vacation. Convinced they can't go far or afford much, Robin settles on a week at a rustic cabin near Deep Creek Lake. “Not actually on the waterfront,” Tyler adds, “because Robin said that was too pricey, but close enough; close enough.”
Such deceptively casual asides have endeared Tyler to readers for more than half a century. In novel after novel, she catches the mingled strains of affection and exasperation that tie a family together, the love that persists somewhere between laughing and sighing.
The days play out as placidly as the surface of Deep Creek Lake — and with the same murky depths lurking beneath. Only the youngest, little David, seems to take the risk of drowning seriously. How is it that boy-crazy Lily's parents don't suspect what's happening between her and the man she's disappearing with every morning? With exquisite subtlety, this early chapter lays down the psychological trajectories of several storylines that develop throughout French Braid. It's also a reminder that Tyler, despite being a novelist, commands all the tools of a brilliant short story writer.
Every time we meet the Garretts in a new chapter, about 10 years have passed. Seeing the Garretts every decade creates a structure that, like Tyler's whole body of work, offers recurring moments of recognition punctuated by surprise. Over the years, Robin and Mercy's marriage strains almost to the point of breaking, but their devotion to one another has a kind of elasticity that's baffling to their children who are unacquainted with the tensile strength of alloyed love. Meanwhile, the siblings drift into their disparate personalities, adult exaggerations of their childhood anxieties and desires. If what ties these people together sometimes feels constraining, it's also lovely — a French braid that leaves an indelible impression on the strands of their lives.
Late in the novel, David's wife reminds him: “This is what families do for each other — hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses.”
“And little cruelties,” David adds.
Who captures that paradox so well as Anne Tyler, our patron saint of the unremarked outlandishness of ordinary life?