There’s a scene near the end of Anne Tyler’s new novel, Three Days in June, where the two main characters, a divorced middle-aged couple named Gail and Max, compare their lives to the movie Groundhog Day, “where people live through the same day over and over until they get it right”, Gail reminds him. “Wouldn’t it be great if the world worked that way?” says Max. Instead, Tyler’s novels are records of the numerous ways people get things wrong and learn to live with it, and how the wrong things have a sneaky habit, eventually, of turning out to be right.
Take Gail and Max, who are familiar types from Tyler’s work. She is an orderly worrier, a little abrupt, “right-angled”, who cuts her own hair for fear of the chitchat she gets in the salon. Max, on the other hand, is a big, messy, boundaryless but kind-hearted man who generates “hillocks of clutter” wherever he sits. They could represent the twin impulses – of connection and withdrawal – that have lapped at Tyler’s novels like the tides eroding and shaping a coastline. Though they divorced many years before, Max and Gail have been brought together by the wedding of their 33-year-old daughter, Debbie. The day before the wedding, Max turns up at Gail’s house in the outskirts of Baltimore with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder and an old cat in need of a home, and at first, Gail is of a mind to put neither of them up. “I didn’t even want a house plant. I had reached the stage in life where I was done with caretaking.”
