Family saga is the very stuff of life

Tyler never loses sight of the big (or the small moments) that shape our destiny

MEETING a new partner’s parents is never easy. An unavoidably stressful encounter is made more fraught by the knowledge that beneath the smiling welcome lies a web of emotional tripwires which, if triggered, might result in lifelong reverberations.

The occasion is even trickier for Serena, whose absent family comes under critical scrutiny from her boyfriend before she ever meets his mum and dad.

What had seemed a promising relationship begins to unravel while they await the train from her native Baltimore to his home town of Philadelphia. On the concourse they meet one of Serena’s cousins. The awkwardness of their encounter makes Serena’s boyfriend roll his eyes: “I have to say, you guys give a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘onceremoved’.”

Anne Tyler’s 24th title follows a long line whose domestic setting and tone belies the depths of feeling, and the often bitter and treacherous currents flowing under the surface.

Her distinguished career includes Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Breathing Lessons. Yet, as her latest novel shows, she remains as inquisitive about people and their relationships as in those earlier books.

French Braid revolves around the reasons why members of the Garrett clan are almost estranged. “Long long ago when they had still been a family”, reflects one of the dizzying cast in this expertly structured saga of childhood angst and adult dissatisfaction. Not until the final pages, however, are the reasons for the rift explained.

Opening her story in 2010, as Serena and her boyfriend await their train, Tyler then leaps back to 1959, where the origins of the Garretts’ trouble began. In the chapters that follow the years click back and forth, like train departures on an old-fashioned notice board.

A character first glimpsed by reference to his funeral reappears as a middle-aged father. Later this image is supplanted by his youthful, newly married self, as Tyler fills in the story from each of the protagonists’ perspectives in a revolving, tightly controlled series of present and past vignettes.

All the while, the destination of the family train remains the same for all: to fathom those with whom they were raised, not to mention their own children, who fizz like lemonade, bringing zest to the story. Tyler seems to relish depicting the youngest members of the tale, their presence giving the story its intergenerational heft and profundity.

Two individuals in particular shape the plot. The first is David, the youngest of Mercy and Robin Garrett’s three children, seen initially aged seven, full of fun and imagination.

The other is his bohemian mother Mercy who, when all the youngsters have fled the coop, follows them. Leaving her husband to run the family plumbing business, she rents a studio where she spends increasing prolonged periods of time. When she is offered an orchid to decorate the studio, she turns it down as “too much to take care of”. No wonder her grown-up daughter Lily thinks her mother “was like those cats who fail to recognise their own kittens after they’ve grown up”.

Mercy’s youthful ambition to study art in Paris never came to anything, but she sets herself up as a house portraitist, finding the special “soul” of people’s homes in a corner on the stairway or a grandfather clock.

Her style is striking: broad brushstrokes for everything except one object, which she paints in almost off-putting detail.

It’s an approach Tyler knows well. If you were only to read a page of French Braid, you might wonder where the welter of seemingly incidental colour was leading. She shows her characters’ anxieties over traffic, or clothes, a cascade of information that flows past effortlessly in her easy, deliberately folksy manner.

Not for a moment, however, does Tyler ignore the bigger picture. Her laser-like focus goes hand in hand with a firm grasp of the background against which events unfold, be it the historical, geographical, political or

social landscape.

As this novel demonstrates on several occasions, few are better at covering the passage of time, and hinting at the shifting cultural climate in a single sentence.

When at one point the narrative jumps forward by several years, and Lily joins the Garrett business, you sense increasingly paranoid America: “she managed the store for her father now that young Pickford had become a survivalist and moved to the wilds of Montana.”

If you had to choose a name for Tyler’s literary technique, which has grown more pronounced in recent years, pointilliste might cover it. It can be irksome, requiring complete concentration on small matters, like the orchid, and committing to memory a cast list to rival Les Miserables.

The rewards, however, are rich. Not a line of this, or her other fiction, is surplus.

Every scrap of conversation is meaningful, as when Lily – pregnant by a married man – reveals how she and her husband no longer get along: “We have absolutely nothing in common.”

“Lots of couples have nothing in common,” Mercy told her. “That may be fine for you, Mom, but I’m not going

to settle.” “Settle!” Mercy burst out. She felt stung. “Well, aren’t you special!”

In that moment, Mercy’s future opens up. At the same time, that of her steady, decent, unexciting husband pitifully narrows. It is telling that both his daughters name their first-born child for him.

Yet with his own son David, who grows into an absence the minute he leaves for college, Robin leaves an impression of an entirely different kind. Belatedly, he gets an inkling of what being a father is about: “maybe parenthood was meant to be educational… a lesson for the parents on totally other styles of being.”

Parenting is one of Tyler’s great themes. Equally familiar, and powerfully reworked from various angles, is the way domesticity can crush the life out of women.

Escaping the shackles of motherhood and wifedom is one of her oldest refrains, and the consequences of being stifled are vividly, persuasively and, as in this novel, poignantly conveyed.

French Braid revolves around the reasons why members of the Garrett clan are almost estranged