French Braid (2022)

Anne Tyler’s latest may sound like typical fare—a multigenerational story of a Baltimore family—but it flat surprised me how good it is. If her work in the past 10 years has sparked up some, I think it still has not been up to the heights of her 20th-century work for quite some time. But French Braid reasserts her novelistic powers with a large-scale story told in small, telling scenes. My favorite part is that it’s not particularly nice—not so feel-good, except it felt good to read a really good Anne Tyler novel again. For one thing, she found a way to write around her difficulties with the contemporary world and especially its technology. After an opening salvo in the present day, the novel retreats all the way back to 1959, and brings the action forward one decade at a time. The ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s were arguably her heyday and she obviously feels more comfortable in those periods—even thrives in them, with sharp insight on feminism and families. The first generation we encounter is Mercy and Robin, an interclass couple who marry in 1940. They quickly have two girls, Alice and Lily, and much later a boy, David. Each of them, in turn, marry and have their own families. It does start to get a little hazy and confusing with the third generation. In fact, with the occupations of the youngest we are veering close to Tyler’s slightly Mr. Magoo view of present times. She is actually pretty good on the initial 2020 phase of the pandemic anyway. And frankly it doesn’t matter that much, because Mercy, Robin, Alice, Lily, and David are drawn so well and come to such vivid life. Nearing 80 as she wrote, Tyler can take the long view of life with considerable credibility. It’s a chief virtue here. The family is decidedly US middle-class but unpredictable and surprising, always in believable ways. They are typical only because all their heartaches and their joys too are unique and specific to them. Tyler even finds ways to lean into her usual repressed character types, more or less her signature, by drawing back from them a little instead of focusing on their extremes of withdrawn behavior. There are still extremes. There is a story about a cat I can sense is going to haunt me for a while. Lily’s fate made me insanely happy because it felt like just one of those redemption stories that happen to people. Mercy, the family matriarch, is probably the main character in this cast. She’s prickly and difficult to be easy with. She makes some strange decisions. On the internet, she’s the reason many people don’t like French Braid. She is unlikable in many ways, but she’s also heroic, and sounds the feminist note with a good deal of cool clarity. I started this novel with low expectations and by the halfway point had an idea how good it was. One of her best.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.