The storytelling is with these two, Red and Abby, but not entirely with either one. The Whitshanks' college-age son Denny phones in the night to say he's gay, and hangs up, leaving us no wiser than his parents about what to make of his call - which, like his mother, we didn't get to hear his end of, although his father, who answered, seems no clearer.
This is no less true of "A Spool of Blue Thread," which begins in what looks like something of a muddle. While they're wondering how to do it, they're muddling through: accidental tourists, amateur marriages, breathing lessons, beginner's goodbyes. The breadth and depth of the knowledge deployed in her books don't extend beyond what's available to her characters, a mostly homey sort.Īnd yet, however modest they are or circumscribed their lives, the people in Tyler's books are engaged with the critical question - how to live? - and somehow manage to be entertaining while they're at it. Her work is short on pyrotechnics (although the most sophisticated of our post-post-moderns would be hard pressed to match her wit, so perfectly timed and subtly tuned as to seem self-effacing). Grad students, for the most part, are not going to huddle in coffee shops talking Tyler hermeneutics (although a person could spend some time on the surname in this particular novel, "Whitshank"). For these, I'd say that Anne Tyler's "problem" is that she's too readable. So this review is aimed at the uninitiated, the holdouts and the skeptics. You legion of lovers of Anne Tyler are going to get this new novel of hers and love it, too.
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