It’s the idea of family itself, something that has always provided such rich material for Tyler, which seems to weigh down so heavily on the Garretts. It’s another of Tyler’s extraordinarily unshowy but devastating moments of indicating a family that will do strange things out of love for one another. It would upset Robin if she left him, so she never says that she has – and no one in the family ever admits it either. Perhaps most extraordinary is when Mercy moves out of the family home, one laundry bag at a time, and eventually starts living full-time in her studio and trying to make a living as a painter. Their eldest, Alice, takes charge of the cooking Lily, the middle child, spends most of it off necking with a boy called Trent and young David, age seven, cautiously avoids getting into the water until his dad forces him into it. While there, it’s as though they are individuals unconnected with one another: Mercy wants to get on with her watercolours, while Robin wades into the lake and has blokey chats with a new friend he’s made. They are embarking on their first proper holiday with their three children, heading for Deep Creek Lake and stoically determined to enjoy themselves.
He has taken over the running of a hardware shop that ran in Mercy’s family she has parked her painterly ambitions in order to be a housewife and a mother. The action spins back to 1959, and we meet Robin and Mercy Garrett. The Garretts are a family that don’t really know each other, nor what to say to one another. Nothing deeply traumatic happens in this family –in fact, it’s the nothingness that conjures a kind of unshiftable cloud of pain and loss. The question is like a prayer that hangs over the book.
“Oh, what makes a family not work?” she wonders. We begin in 2010, when granddaughter Serena spots her cousin in a train station her boyfriend is bemused at the fact she’s hesitant about saying hello to him. The novel introduces us to the Garretts, an unremarkable family from Baltimore.
And then I thought about it, and I thought about it some more, and I realised – boom – she really is a master. After finishing French Braid, the 24 th novel from the formidable American novelist, I was going about my life thinking nothing particularly radical had happened to me. French Braid is Anne Tyler’s 24th novel ( )
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