The Tin Can Tree (1965)

Anne Tyler’s second novel was published when she was 23 or 24, so my expectations were not that high. It’s set in North Carolina, where she grew up and went to college before moving to Baltimore literally and figuratively. It features a family named Pike, a new experience for me after only Captain Christopher Pike on the original Star Trek series. Tyler is still obviously learning her craft, but her sense of character building is already there and not bad. She bravely takes on a story of a family who have lost a 6-year-old to an accidental death, a pretty good premise which she makes even better by noticing the child was not the favored one of the parents. It’s poignant on its own terms. Tyler kind of misfires by making the parents seem older than they probably are. The surviving older brother is not even 10 yet. Mr. and Mrs. Pike, so-called, are thus probably not even 40 but they feel like they are pushing 60. Some of that can be chalked up to the pain and grief of the loss, maybe. Mrs. Pike is practically catatonic, which feels like an exaggeration. The Pikes live in a peculiar building that also houses two other sets of tenants. They all share a porch and the building goes two stories, isolated in the country outside a small town. I had a hard time imagining it, let alone believing it. They are a bunch of quirky kooks, which is the most recognizably Tyler aspect of The Tin Can Tree. One set of tenants is a pair of older women, sisters or cousins. The other is a pair of brothers, one taking care of the other, who suffers from complications of anemia and is annoying. I thought the novel worked better than some of her other early ones—there’s a good deal of complexity to all these characters—but she’s still on the novel-writing learning curve here, as amazing as it is for a second novel by someone so young. I like the basic premise but I’m not sure Tyler had the lived experience yet to do it justice. A lot of things about The Tin Can Tree just feel made up. The families are fractured but, in the case of the brothers, they feel undeveloped even though they turn out to be an important (if late-arriving) plot point. Someone on Goodreads compared it to Steinbeck and that seems fair enough, although my edition has an interview with Tyler from many years later. She is critical of certain shortcomings in this novel but never mentions any influences. It’s kind of a rough one in many ways but completists may be relieved to find that overall it’s not bad.

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