CLOCK DANCE

ANNE TYLER

Chatto & Windus, 304pp £18.99, Oldie price £11.81 inc p&p

As a child Willa Drake, the heroine of Anne Tyler’s 22nd novel, had ‘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.’ Clock Dance shows us Willa, aged 61, finding her feet up in a warmer, rougher world than the one she has settled for. There are flashbacks to an uneasy childhood with a Hedda Gabler mother, and a first marriage to a patronising bully, before we catch up with her empty present – married to a golf-mad second husband and living in reluctant retirement in Arizona. When Willa receives a call from Baltimore telling her that her son’s ex-girlfriend has been shot and needs her help Willa determines to go, despite never having met her or any of her Baltimore circle. Julie Myerson in the Guardian described the novel as ‘irksomely homely’ but most other reviewers agreed that Tyler had scored another winner. Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday observed that her work was ‘closer to life than to art. It is almost as though we are there to witness time passing, and people changing’. Patrick Gale in the Telegraph praised her for striking ‘quite brutally… at the heart of domestic stability or conventional happiness’.