French Braid is Anne Tyler’s 24th novel
(Picture: )I’ve been Anne Tyler-ed. After finishing French Braid, the 24th novel from the formidable American novelist, I was going about my life thinking nothing particularly radical had happened to me. And then I thought about it, and I thought about it some more, and I realised – boom – she really is a master.
The novel introduces us to the Garretts, an unremarkable family from Baltimore. We begin in 2010, when granddaughter Serena spots her cousin in a train station; her boyfriend is bemused at the fact she’s hesitant about saying hello to him. “Oh, what makes a family not work?” she wonders. The question is like a prayer that hangs over the book. Nothing deeply traumatic happens in this family –in fact, it’s the nothingness that conjures a kind of unshiftable cloud of pain and loss. The Garretts are a family that don’t really know each other, nor what to say to one another.
The action spins back to 1959, and we meet Robin and Mercy Garrett. He has taken over the running of a hardware shop that ran in Mercy’s family; she has parked her painterly ambitions in order to be a housewife and a mother. They are embarking on their first proper holiday with their three children, heading for Deep Creek Lake and stoically determined to enjoy themselves. While there, it’s as though they are individuals unconnected with one another: Mercy wants to get on with her watercolours, while Robin wades into the lake and has blokey chats with a new friend he’s made. Their eldest, Alice, takes charge of the cooking; Lily, the middle child, spends most of it off necking with a boy called Trent; and young David, age seven, cautiously avoids getting into the water until his dad forces him into it.
We jump ahead in time with each chapter, observing how the family dynamic has shaped each of them. Alice becomes prissy and domineering and Lily is flaky and unmoored, while David, never losing the sense that his dad dislikes him, keeps his family at arm’s length. Tyler’s set-pieces – here largely conceived as awkward family get-togethers – seem undramatic, but her rhythms are masterly. In one, David brings home his new partner Greta and her young daughter; he doesn’t explain that they are in a relationship, and, like rabbits trapped in headlights, no one asks. Conversations start then short circuit, sputter back into life and then get stuck again.
Perhaps most extraordinary is when Mercy moves out of the family home, one laundry bag at a time, and eventually starts living full-time in her studio and trying to make a living as a painter. It would upset Robin if she left him, so she never says that she has – and no one in the family ever admits it either. It’s another of Tyler’s extraordinarily unshowy but devastating moments of indicating a family that will do strange things out of love for one another.
It’s the idea of family itself, something that has always provided such rich material for Tyler, which seems to weigh down so heavily on the Garretts. Early on, Serena becomes irritated and defensive after meeting her new boyfriend’s welcoming family. “The trouble with wide-open families was, there was something very narrow about their attitude to not-open families,” she thinks. It’s as thought the Garretts can sense that being a family doesn’t come quite naturally to them, and end up crushed by the expectation of it as a concept.
But in each of these chapters comes a quiet moment of emotional truth – a grandmother encouraging her granddaughter’s curiosity about art, or a usually reticent brother’s unfiltered outpouring of love for his new wife – that catches us the reader off guard as much as it does the characters. Sentences appear that seem simple and then suddenly break your heart, such as Mercy’s reflection on her now-grown family: “It all happened so fast, she thought, even though it had seemed endless at the time.” Like I said... I’ve been Anne Tyler-ed.
French Tyler by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus, £16.99)
