Everything about Anne Tyler’s 24th novel, “French Braid,” is immediately recognizable to her fans. The story offers such a complete checklist of the author’s usual motifs and themes that it could serve as the Guidebook to Anne Tyler in the Wild. The insular Baltimore family, the quirky occupations, the special foods — they all move across these pages as predictably as the phases of the moon.
There are times when such familiarity might feel tiresome. But we’re not in one of those times. Indeed, given today’s slate of horror and chaos, the rich melody of “French Braid” offers the comfort of a beloved hymn. It doesn’t even matter if you believe in the sanctity of family life; the sound alone brings solace.
The Garretts are a classic Tyler tribe: responsible, middle-class, kind but flinty. Robin and Mercy have inherited the family plumbing supply store. They’re the parents of three blue-eyed children: two teenage daughters — one responsible, one boy-crazy — and a 7-year-old son who’s adorably serious and “often seemed weirdly smart about people.”
We meet the Garretts in 1959 when Robin finally takes his family on their first vacation, an outing long postponed by his reluctance to leave the store in anyone else’s hands. Convinced they can’t go far or afford much, Robin settles on a week at a rustic cabin near Deep Creek Lake. “Not actually on the waterfront,” Tyler adds, “because Robin said that was too pricey, but close enough; close enough.” Such deceptively casual asides have endeared Tyler to readers for more than half a century. In novel after novel, she catches the mingled strains of affection and exasperation that tie a family together, the love that persists somewhere between laughing and sighing.
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As the Garretts’ week in the woods plays out, Tyler follows each member of the family. With simple meals, card games and afternoons at the lake, this is a study in the subterranean movements of idleness. The children notice their father “is not a born vacationer.” Tyler explains, “There was something effortful about him.” Mercy, meanwhile, gets lost in her amateur painting. David, the Garretts’ youngest child, would rather not learn to swim, thank you very much, but he seems perfectly happy playing with his plastic GIs. And their younger daughter, 15-year-old Lily, dashes off every day with a handsome 21-year-old man who’s vacationing nearby. Her expectations of being proposed to — in a gazebo! — strike everyone in the family as charmingly ridiculous.
The days play out as placidly as the surface of Deep Creek Lake — and with the same murky depths lurking beneath. Only little David seems to take the risk of drowning seriously. How is it that Lily’s parents don’t suspect what’s happening between her and the man she’s disappearing with every morning? Alice, the eldest child, has “the sudden peculiar feeling that she had somehow become older than her mother — her dainty little mother drifting in space.” Then in a flash, like light hitting a knife blade in a crowd, she thinks, “Everybody was separate. Even her father, a few yards away from her, was swimming now toward shore. A passerby would never guess the Garretts even knew each other. They looked so scattered, and so lonesome.”
With exquisite subtlety, this early chapter lays down the psychological trajectories of several storylines that develop throughout “French Braid.” It’s also a reminder that. although Tyler has devoted her life to novels, she commands all the tools of a brilliant short story writer.
Now 80 years old, Tyler can move freely up and down the scale of ages with complete authority, capturing the patient spirit of a retiree, the buoyant expectation of a second-grader or the unstable realm of naivete and dread where teenagers hang out. Every time we meet the Garretts in a new chapter, about 10 years have passed. The effect is neither jarring nor schematic, more like the gentle turning of leaves in a photo album. Children go off to college, graduates get married, spouses have babies — a perfectly natural turn of events, anchored by captivating snapshots of a growing family.
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Seeing the Garretts every decade creates a structure that, like Tyler’s whole body of work, offers recurring moments of recognition punctuated by surprise. Over the years, Robin and Mercy’s marriage strains almost to the point of breaking, but their devotion to one another has a kind of elasticity that’s baffling to their children who are unacquainted with the tensile strength of alloyed love. “Marriages have stages. They have incarnations, almost,” Mercy explains. “You can be in a good marriage and you can be in a bad marriage, and they can both be the same one but just at different times.” The slow-flashing strobe light of this novel makes that clear.
Meanwhile, the siblings drift into their disparate personalities, adult exaggerations of their childhood anxieties and desires. If what ties these people together sometimes feels constraining, it’s also lovely — a French braid that leaves an indelible impression on the strands of their lives. “That’s how families work,” David realizes as an adult. “You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever.”
Late in the novel, David’s wife reminds him: “This is what families do for each other — hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses.”
“And little cruelties,” David adds.
Who captures that poignant paradox so well as Anne Tyler, our patron saint of the unremarked outlandishness of ordinary life?
Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts the Book Report for CBS “Sunday Morning.”
French Braid
By Anne Tyler
Knopf. 244 pp. $27
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