A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

Pulitzer Prize winner, Anne Tyler, has been a favorite of mine for a long time, I have already read all of her novels, so when a new title appears, it becomes a major event in my mind.  She writes relatively slowly – about 2-3 years or more between books.  A Spool of Blue Thread, her twentieth novel, has been shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize.  She is the first American woman to be so honored.  My fingers, toes, and eyes are all crossed as I await the announcement in mid-October.

The most interesting thing about the novel is its structure.  The novel is a story of four generations of a family in Baltimore, Maryland.  Tyler begins with Red and Abby Whitshank, who have two daughters, a son, Denny, and a boy taken in by Abby as an infant when his parents are killed in an auto accident.  They conceal this last bit of information from Douglas – nicknamed “Stem,” until he has reached adulthood.  Oddly, the other children know about the circumstances of his birth but never tell Stem.

As the novel opens, Denny has disappeared from the family.  Every few months, he calls from some unusual place, far away from his parents, only to cut off contact, until he resurfaces somewhere else.  Suddenly, he shows up at his parents’ home with a child, Susan.  The novel then shifts to the story of the meeting and courtship of Red and Abby.  Abby is about to give into Dane, who wants to marry her, but she has an eye on Red.  Then the narrative shifts to Junior and Linnie, Red’s parents, how they met and eventually married and had a daughter, Merrick. The novel ends with the sale of the family home – built by Junior – and the removal of Red to an apartment.  This part – foreshadowed in several of the chapters, struck me so deeply with its verisimilitude.  I am experiencing the same anguish as my parents pass mile marker 90.

Tyler has a gentle, smooth, and completely absorbing style.  She draws characters as round and full as humanly possible.  By telling the story in reverse order – from youngest to eldest – Tyler excavates the Whitshank family tree.  Late in the novel, Junior and Abby “interview” Dane, who is between jobs and working for Junior.  A narrator takes up an observation about Junior and Linnae.  Tyler writes, “How could this man have been the hero of Mrs. Whitshank’s romance?  Whether you found it dashing or tawdry, at least it had been a romance, complete with intrigue and scandal and a wrenching separation.  But Junior Whitshank was as dry as a bone, droning on relentlessly while the other diners ate their food in dogged silence.  Only his wife was looking at him, her face alight with interest as he discussed the value of hard labor, then the deplorable lack of initiative in the younger generation, then the benefits conferred by having lived through the Great Depression.  If young folks today had lived through a depression the way he had lived through a depression – but the he broke off to call, ‘Ah! Going out with your buddies?’ // It was Merrick he was addressing.  She was crossing the hall and stopped to face him. ‘Yup,’ she said.  ‘Don’t wait supper.’  Her hair had become a mass of bubbly black curls that bounced all over her head” (255).

In several of Tyler’s novels – especially The Accidental Tourist – a quiet, reserved man becomes enamored by a bubbly, vivacious woman.  Despite the man’s protests, he succumbs to the charms of the woman, and as the novel ends, it is clear to the reader, the guy is falling for the girl.  In A Spool of Blue Thread, the bubbly girl turns out to be 18-year-old Linnie, who has a desperate crush on Junior.  He is trying to survive the depression by doing odd jobs.  He cannot afford another mouth to feed.

All things considered – to borrow a phrase from NPR – Anne Tyler’s wonderful saga of four generations will surprise and delight the reader.  In A Spool of Blue Thread, I believe everyone can find a family member which that seems ever so tantalizingly familiar. 5 stars

--Chiron, 10/2/15

Searching for Caleb by Anne Tyler

Page 50 of Ann Tyler’s early novel, Searching for Caleb, is the end of chapter three.  Around page 40, I decided I would give this novel to exactly page 50.  But suddenly, the story became really interesting, and I plowed right through that barrier.

According to the dust jacket on her latest novel, Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina.  She has written eleven novels, and Breathing Lessons won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.  Most of her novels detail the lives of slightly dysfunctional families, but she does so with a dry and subtle wit.  Almost all her novels I have read are set – at least in part – in Baltimore, Maryland.

The novel opens with a somewhat dreary portrait of the Peck Family.  The patriarch, Daniel Peck, inherited a rather exhausting array of rules governing his family.  The least peculiar of which involved carrying cream-colored paper, and an addressed and stamped envelope.  These “bread and butter” notes were to be written immediately upon leaving the home of family or friends after a visit.  The notes were formulaic.  A brief thanks for the hospitality followed by a specific mention of some bright spot in the visit.  Daniel required mailing at the first post office spotted on the way home.  He

did not trust corner mail boxes when they changed from Army green to red and blue.

The story revolves around Justine – Daniel’s granddaughter -- her husband, Duncan, who also happened to be her cousin, their child Meg, and Caleb.  Caleb left home unannounced in 1912.  He never contacted any members of the family.  As Daniel aged, he clung to a single, odd photo of Caleb, with a cello, in the doorway of the second floor of a barn.  The compound of houses provided living space for all the children and grandchildren.  He becomes obsessed with finding his brother. 

After Caleb, Justine and Duncan were the first to break away from this restrictive family circle.  Justine loved all of her relatives, especially Daniel, so she reluctantly left with Duncan to start a goat farm.  As Duncan became bored with this project, he suddenly changed to chickens, then antiques.  Tyler describes the young couple’s arrival at their new house.  She writes, “‘Look! Someone left a pair of pliers,’ she said.  ‘And here’s a chair we can use for the porch.’  She was a pack rat; all of them were.  It was a family trait.  You could tell that in a flash when they started carrying things in from the truck – the bales of ancient, curly-edged magazines, zipper bags bursting with unfashionable clothes, cardboard boxes marked Clippings, Used Wrapping Paper, Photos, Empty Bottles.  Duncan and Justine staggered into the grandfather’s room carrying a steel filing cabinet from his old office, stuffed with carbon copies of all his personal correspondence for the twenty-three years since his retirement. In one corner of their own room Duncan stacked crates of machine parts and nameless metal objects picked up on walks, which he might someday want to use for some invention.  He had cartons of books, most of them second-hand, dealing with things like the development of the quantum theory and the philosophy of Lao-Tzu and the tribal life of Ila-speaking Northern Rhodesians” (31).

An example of Tyler’s humor involves Justine, who hated sweetened tea.  On a visit to her daughter, Meg’s home – shared with her mother-in-law, Mrs. Milson – Justine is given a glass of sweetened tea, despite the fact Meg asked the elderly woman to fix her some without sugar.  The excruciatingly polite Justine, sips the tea without complaint.  Then she notices candy on the coffee table.  “Justine chose that moment to reach toward the green glass shoe on the coffee table – sourballs! Right under her nose! – and chose a lemony yellow globe and pop it into her mouth, where she instantly discovered she that she had eaten a marble.  While everyone watched in silence she plucked it out delicately between thumb and forefinger and replaced it, only a little shinier than before, in the green glass shoe.  ‘I thought we could have used more rain,’ she told the ring of faces” (227).

Anne Tyler’s Searching for Caleb is a lot of fun.  She expertly handles all the peculiarities and foibles one can imagine in an overly eccentric family.  Try any of her novels, and you will be hooked as I am.  5 stars.

--Chiron, 1/10/15

The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler

A treat is something wonderful which only comes once in a while. Special treats are spaced far apart and are especially welcome when they do appear. Baltimore-native Anne Tyler is a writer I have admired for a very long time. Her novels appear only once in a while with varying degrees of regularity. However, whenever a new novel does appear, I drop whatever I am reading for her.

The Beginner’s Goodbye tells the story of Aaron Woolcott, an editor at his family’s vanity publishing house, Woolcott Publishing. Aaron’s wife, Dorothy, has died in a tragic accident, and the novel begins with a visit from Dorothy. At first, Aaron is tentative, questioning his own sanity. Then, because he misses her so much, he looks forward to her appearances, and doesn’t wish to question her about her visits, fearing she would leave and never come back. Aaron was devoted to Dorothy, and he reflects, “one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with” (54).

Aaron’s sister, Nandina, also works at Woolcott, but she is something of a tyrant in the office. She invites Aaron to stay with her while repairs are made to his house. He hires a contractor, gives Gil the keys, and says, fix my house, “Everything. I don’t know. Just take care of it. You decide” (76). Aaron cannot bring himself to go home to the scene of Dorothy’s death.

Tyler’s prose is soft, calm, and understated. She weaves a tale of the interesting, ordinary quality of middle class lives set mostly in her home town. On one occasion, late in the novel, Aaron walks down the street of his house, and sees Dorothy standing on the sidewalk. Tyler writes, “Harder to figure, though, was that she didn’t visit our own house – at least not the interior. Wouldn’t you suppose she’d be interested? The closest she’d come was that time on the sidewalk. But then, one Sunday morning, I caught sight of her in the back yard, beside where the oak tree had been. It was one of the few occasions she was already in place before I arrived. I glanced out our kitchen window and saw her standing there, looking down at the wood chips, with her hands jammed in the pockets of her doctor coat. I made it to her side in record time, even though I seem to have left my cane somewhere in the house. I said, slightly short of breath – ‘You see they removed all the evidence. Ground the stump to bits even.’ ‘Mmhmm,’ she said. I stopped. This wasn’t what I wanted to be talking about. During all the months when she had been absent, there were so many things I had saved up to tell her, so many bits of news about the house and the neighborhood and friends and work and family, but now they seemed inconsequential. Puny. Move far enough away from an even and it sort of levels out, so to speak – settles into the general landscape” (147-148). Aaron does “sort things out” – with Dorothy’s help -- and moves on with his life.

If you have never read Anne Tyler, Any number of her 18 novels would be a good place to start, but The Beginner’s Goodbye would be a wonderful introduction to this award-winning novelist. 5 stars (565)

--Chiron, 5/6/12

Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler

If you are lucky, sometime during your life, you will meet that one person you belong with -- to have and to hold from that day forward. If you are very lucky you get to be with that person for a long time. If you are extremely lucky, that person is the last you ever need to meet.

Anne Tyler is one of my favorite authors, and I haven’t read anything by her in quite a while. She revels in relationships made and broken, found at the oddest times, in the oddest places and sometimes solidified and lost in a couple of weeks.

Liam Pennywell is nearly 61. He has a job he loves and does well, but it was not what he prepared himself to do. He drives a used Geo, and he lives alone. His ex-wife is a librarian, and he has an acceptably good relationship with her because of their three daughters. One day he meets Eunice Dunstead, who faintly reminds me of Muriel in an earlier Tyler novel, The Accidental Tourist. Liam and Eunice bond almost immediately, and Liam even says, “You’re the woman I love, and life is too short to go through it without you” (230).

Alas, life is not so simple, and numerous complications crowd in on Liam and his solitary life -- strangers, family, a job -- and Liam reflects on his life in great detail. On Christmas day, Liam visits with his daughters and grandchild, but later, he opts for solitude. Tyler writes,

“It didn’t bother Liam that he would be spending Christmas Day on his own. He had a new book about Socrates that he was longing to get on with, and he’d picked up a rotisserie chicken from the Giant the day before (275) …

Before he settled in with his book, he put the chicken in the oven on low and he exchanged his sneakers for slippers. Then he switched on the lamp beside his favorite armchair. He sat down and opened the book and laid Jonah’s bookmark on the table next to him. He leaned back against the cushions with a contented sigh. All he lacked was a fireplace, he thought.

But that was all right. He didn’t need a fireplace.

Socrates said … What was it he had said? Something about the fewer his wants, the closer he was to the gods. And Liam really wanted nothing.” (276)

This novels has such a warm, sweet flow to it, I could barely put it down. It is a wonderful story, wonderfully told. I like Liam. I like Anne Tyler -- a whole great big whopping lot of like -- for both of them. Five stars

--Chiron, 5/5/10