Depth in ordinary lives
After the success of David Simon’s The Wire, Baltimore became associated — for many television fans at least — with derelict high rises, African American teenagers who seemed perpetually doomed to a life of poverty and crime, drunken cops and extraordinary heroes and villains who live each day as if it’s their last.
Anne Tyler, since the publication of her first novel, If Morning Ever Comesin 1964, has written predominately about characters whose lives are centred in Baltimore. But this world is light years away from The Wire.
There are no heroic violent adventures in the quiet, settled, suburban neighbourhood of Hampden, where the story takes place in A Spool of Blue Thread, her 20th work of fiction to date.
Like much of Tyler’s previous work, the novel is a celebration of the mundane and the quotidian tasks that make up day-today living.
It covers much of the 20th century with three narratives: the period where Red and Abby Whitshank are in the latter years of their lives (up to 2012), when they first meet in 1959 and when Junior and Linnie — Red’s parents — fell in love under controversial circumstances in the late 1920s.
These three stories give us some narrative structure, but not a whole lot. Tyler waits until the last quarter of the book to finally unveil any drama.
Her intention is not to focus on one protagonist, but the entire Whitshank family tree.
There are long passages of ordinary speech, rhythmic descriptions of community life, followed by tedious family arguments.
This laborious style of storytelling gives the author incredible authority as an allpowerful, all-knowing omniscient narrator.
And Tyler takes great pleasure in reminding her readers — with post modern irony — of her dominating presence on the text.
She almost snarls at her characters, reminding us how insignificant their lives really are. They are not glamorous and they epitomize the word ordinary in almost everything they do.
Tyler once went 40 years without giving a single interview. Her unwillingness to speak about her own work has led her critics to call her prose sentimental. And they condemn her characters as lacking the dramatic edge an author needs to create proper tension in a novel.
But I think such accusations miss the point of her prose completely.
Indeed, very little happens in her books. Characters get caught up in repetitive, dead-end conversations which merely fill the gaps, and where silence, existentialist terror and a fear of death continually lingers.
But in this passing of time — where seasons change, flowers wither, then bloom again, people marry, babies are born and the elderly die slowly with dignity — Tyler then weighs in with her own subtle commentary as a narrator who exudes tremendous skill and precision.
It is in these details that she attempts to convey truth, meaning and esthetic beauty. And Tyler’s narrative is a brilliant testament to why the novel still provides an enormously important role in our culture, allowing us to capture the little bits of humanity that somehow seem to bypass us in the real world.
Tyler is committed to showing how simple human rituals and, most importantly, love, are really all we have as a species. Another writer that shares this optimistic vision for the human condition is the Irish poet, the late Seamus Heaney.
Like Heaney, Tyler is constantly reminding her readers how little acts of love are all around us if we are prepared to look beneath the surface to capture them.
A Spool of Blue Thread primarily focuses on domestic dreams and disputes, daily ceremonial acts and relationships. Love, loss and death are about the only certainties the author can guarantee. Family is all we have, Tyler’s prose seems to suggest. Society and politics are merely distractions from the primitive nature and very short time span of human existence — the grain of truth contained within this noble artistic vision.