This, blessedly, is now Anne Tyler’s fourth novel since she suggested that 2015’s A Spool of Blue Thread was going to be her last. We might fairly think that some of the things she has said in recent interviews aren’t exactly engraved in stone, not least because French Braid, a warm family saga set between 1959 and the late summer of 2020, appears to represent a U-turn on her intuition that “it’d be really wrongheaded of me to suddenly start talking about the coronavirus at this stage in one of my books”. Responding to a question about whether Covid might break her aversion to putting topical elements in her work, she said: “It would derail the small private story I’m trying to tell.”
After her previous novel, the terrific Redhead By the Side of the Road, generously centred on the blinkered perspective of a middle-aged IT guy, French Braid returns to type: a multigenerational ensemble piece that will have fans marking their Tyler bingo cards, from empty nesters taking later-life left turns and family rifts surrounding odd-one-out siblings.
Set, as usual, in Baltimore, it’s the story of the Garretts: husband and wife Robin and Mercy, children Alice, Lily and David. We meet them on a rare holiday to a Maryland lake, with the girls in their teens and their younger brother a curious seven-year-old happiest playing make-believe with his toys. But Robin, a plumber turned shopkeeper, has other ideas, and his heavy-handed attempt to break David’s reluctance to swim will set family tensions simmering down the decades.
As trauma plots go, it’s not exactly A Little Life, sure, but Tyler has a keen eye for the way small moments can have unpredictable effects in a family’s understanding of one another. The rift, all the more severe for being largely unvoiced, only worsens when David, ready to high-tail it to university in 1970, is forced into a character-building summer job with one of Robin’s plumber friends, rather than volunteer with a community theatre group; Robin wants to teach him that being a man means you can’t always choose.
