FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTENT...

Yes, Anne Tyler’s latest family saga is just like all the others – true to life, written with brilliantly deceptive ease and so absorbing that you’ll think you’ve read ten pages only to find it’s 30

This is, by my reckoning, Anne Tyler’s 22nd novel. By now, her fans should know what to expect. A new Anne Tyler novel will be written in simple prose, with a preference for words of one syllable. It will generally be set in a middleclass suburb of Baltimore. It will chart the hopes and disappointments of family life, often over a period of years.

The main character will most likely be a woman in her later years who has been ever-so-slightly let down by life; her children, once so manageable, will now have grown apart from her, both emotionally and geographically; and her husband will be increasingly cold and distant.

The Tyler heroine will have grown used to keeping the show on the road. While others busy around, obsessing over their own concerns, she will trail behind them, picking up the pieces, doing her best to help out. And, alone at night, she will be left wondering what it is all about, and what she should be doing with the rest of her life.

Yet, within this muddle of upsets and frustrations, of plans gone awry and kindness passing unreciprocated, there will always be a sense of hope, a sense of life being worth the struggle. If Tyler rarely offers the neatness of a traditional happy ending, she does leave you with the sense that human beings are redeemed by their power to develop, and to plot new courses for themselves. And she is often sharp, and very funny. And so there we have it. ‘I start every book thinking: “This one will be different,”’ Tyler said recently. ‘And it’s not.’

Of course, most writers have probably worried, at one time or another, that their work has been getting a bit samey. After finishing each fresh rural tragedy, didn’t Thomas Hardy wish he had come up with a light-hearted romp? And wouldn’t Jane Austen yearn for one of her heroines to pull out a sword, stab her off-putting suitor through the heart, and hot-foot it to London for a night on the tiles?

When Anne Tyler’s last-but-one novel, A Spool Of Blue Thread, was published in 2015, the famously harsh New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani declared that it ‘recyles virtually every theme and major plot point that she has used in the past and does so in the most perfunctory manner imaginable’.

Furthermore, she said that the characters ‘have insinuated themselves so shallowly in the reader’s mind that it’s hard to care much what happens to them’. And finally, she found the novel ‘a disappointing performance from this talented author, who seems to be coasting here on automatic’.

Readers, quite rightly, disagreed. Spool Of Blue Thread went on to become one of her most popular novels, selling 400,000 copies. I suspect that this new one, Clock Dance, will prove just as successful, while provoking similar misgivings in those who have grown too used to Anne Tyler.

Is Clock Dance simply more of the same? We see the story through the eyes of Willa Drake, who is 61 years old in 2017, when the main body of the story takes place. As a child ‘she’d felt like a watchful, wary adult housed in a little girl’s body. And yet nowadays, paradoxically, it often seemed to her that from behind her adult face a child about 11 years old was still gazing out at the world.’ A

Widowed, she has married again, with two grown-up sons from her first marriage. She and her husband, Peter, live just outside Tucson, Arizona, and are comfortably well-off. A familiar Tyler protagonist, she is the home-maker who never quite feels at home herself. ‘Sometimes Willa felt she’d spent half her life apologising for some man’s behaviour. More than half her life, actually. First Derek and then Peter, forever charging ahead while Willa trailed behind picking up the pieces and excusing and explaining.’

One July afternoon, when her husband is out at one of his perennial games of golf, and Willa is sorting her headbands into different colours, the phone rings. ‘You don’t know me,’ announces the woman on the other end of the line. This woman has, thinks Willa, ‘a flat-toned, carrying voice – an overweight voice’.

It turns out that the woman with the overweight voice lives 2,000 miles away, on the other side of America, in Baltimore. She is a neighbour of Denise, a former girlfriend of Willa’s son, and has chanced upon Willa’s phone number in Denise’s address book. Could Willa come and look after Denise’s little daughter while the former girlfriend is in hospital recovering from a gunshot wound? Even though Willa has never even met Denise, and the little girl is not her son’s, Willa decides to make the journey. Why? ‘The truth was that lately, she had not had quite enough happening in her life.’ Her husband is baffled by her decision – ‘You never even met this woman!’ – just as the reader may be. But quite often in Anne Tyler novels – and perhaps also in life – a woman takes a snap decision that is regarded by others as inexplicable.

Chatting about Anne Tyler’s work with friends over the years, I’ve noticed that women often pick as their favourite a novel called Ladder Of Years. It is about a woman called Delia who, sitting on a beach, decides on the spur of the moment to leave her family, who have long taken her for granted.

Without saying a word to anyone, she hitches a lift into a new town, buys a new dress, rents a room in a boarding house and finds a new job.

Clock Dance pursues a similar theme. To what extent can we reinvent our lives? How far will a woman travel in order to feel necessary, and valued?

Even though her new neighbourhood is

fairly rackety, Willa soon feels comfortable in it. ‘The trip to the hospital was vaguely familiar by now – the stream of shabby front porches, the kiddie pools and Big Wheels littering the yards, the signs for Tamaqua’s House of Hair Weaves and FixIt Fred.’

In a similar fashion, Tyler has an almost uncanny knack for making her readers feel at home in strange surroundings. Within a sentence or two, we have got to know old Mrs Minton in her housecoat, who is in the habit of saying, ‘Aren’t people nice?’, and Denise’s ex-husband Hal, whose long-chinned, morose face ‘looked as if it had been clamped between two sliding doors at some point’.

For all its eccentricities and peculiarities – or perhaps because of them – Tyler’s Baltimore is universal, like Trollope’s Barchester, or Flaubert’s Normandy.

How does she do it? Her style is deceptively simple. Even though she performs narrative cartwheels that would lead other novelists to be praised as experimental – the first section of this book is set in 1967, the next in 1997 and the last in 2017 – she does it with such ease that it seems closer to life than to art. It is almost as though we are there to witness time passing, and people changing.

Tyler is perhaps a victim of her own facility. You think you have read about ten pages, only to find you have read 30. Though in most obvious respects she has nothing in common with Elmore Leonard,

other than a genius for dialogue, she follows a number of his valuable Ten Rules of Writing: never use a verb other than ‘said’ for carrying speech, never open a book with weather, avoid detailed descriptions of characters and places, and try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Above all, Anne Tyler sticks to the rule that Leonard billed as the one that sums up all his other ten: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

A long time ago, when a friend of mine was going through terrible turmoil, she told me that she was struggling to read any books, because they all seemed so far removed from life. I suggested the novels of Anne Tyler, and she sailed through them.

It could, of course, be argued that it is the ease with which they can be sailed through that lets them down. As you are reading them, they absorb you. Later, each individual novel tends to elide into all the others, and it soon becomes impossible to distinguish between their different plots and characters.

But isn’t this also like life, and our memories of it?

‘We’re endlessly striving and keeping going,’ Anne Tyler once said. ‘How many times we hurt each other in families or drift apart or do harm – and then we come back together and try over again.’