Humdrum roll

Anne Tyler presents the troubled Garrett family, both as they see themselves and as others see them.

PENGUIN, £16.99 REVIEW BY ALLAN MASSIE

Near the end of this entrancing family novel comes news of another marriage. A younger member of the family expresses surprise that the woman, Lily, didn’t even tell her daughter she was getting married again. “Oh well,” his mother says, “this is America, remember. This country was settled by dissidents and malcontents and misfits and adventurers. Thorny people. They don’t always follow the etiquette.”

Fair enough, and nobody writes better about families than Anne Tyler. Moreover she has a gift denied many novelists of writing sympathetically about people who lead apparently humdrum lives and who would be unlikely, many of them anyway, to read much, certainly not her kind of intelligent, probing novel. Here she writes about a family in which connections between its members are strained but never quite severed.

It begins with a nice piece of misdirection, a conversation between young lovers on a train journey to Baltimore, the girl Serena’s home city. I say “misdirection” because reading this first chapter, you assume that the novel will be Serena and James’s story. But it isn’t. It’s about Serena’s family, the Garretts, and their connections are frayed and loose.

We go back then to 1959 and the only family vacation the Garretts, Robin and Mercy, and their children Alice, Lily and little David, ever took together. Alice was then 17 and this rather drab and unrewarding week in a lakeside cabin is mostly seen through her eyes.

Robin, who owns a plumbing materials store, spends time in the lake. To his disappointment, his little son, David, is frightened of the water, and will grow up sure his father didn’t like him. Mercy goes sketching in the woods. Fifteen-year-old Lily takes up with an unsuitable boy and