
Anne Tyler’s back doing what Anne Tylers do best: being a nicer, better, more experienced, less pointlessly antagonistic version of Jonathan Franzen. In A Spool of Blue Thread, she brings us another example of what I call the “family epic”: a novel tracing the history of a family – in this case, the Whitshank family, from the Depression up to the present day. Because it’s Tyler, these events take place in Baltimore.
I feel like I’m the last person in the world to read this book, mostly because I recommended Tyler to my friends who then went and read this when it was released, whereas it languished on my to-read list for ages. As expected, the characters are complex, and their relationships even more so. Tyler has a marvellous technique of introducing characters in a way that sets the reader against them, only to evoke our sympathies a chapter or two later. (She also takes the reverse tack sometimes: witness Pearl in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.) In this case, the very first event in the novel is a son calling his father late at night to come out of the closet; the father, Red, responds, “What the hell, Denny?” When Denny predictably hangs up, Red and his wife Abby argue about Red’s reaction. Denny’s not gay, Red insists. He was just waiting for Red to respond badly so he could slam the phone down. Of course we’re on Denny’s side through all of this: what sort of monster is his father, anyway? It takes several chapters of observing both characters before we work out that Red was right: Denny (who is not gay) was just waiting for an opportunity to be self-righteously wounded. (Of course, Red was also wrong in his reaction, which gave Denny more ammunition.)
Tyler novels generally, and this one specifically, are about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and about our identities as individuals and how they go together to form an identity as a group (which is almost always a family). The Whitshank family has a few stories about itself: how Junior, the patriarch, came to acquire the family home; how Aunt Merrick landed her rich husband; how Abby realised she loved Red. These are told so often that even their language has become fixed. However, the closer we come to the Whitshanks, the more we realise that they’re defined just as much by the stories they don’t tell about themselves. It takes several chapters, for instance, before we learn that one of them is adopted.
I’m not without criticism. In particular, the third section of the book (although still narrated in the third person) is told entirely from Junior’s perspective; this can be contrasted with the others, which shift around the various members of the family. I’m aware that the content of this part of the novel is important to our understanding of the Whitshank family, but compared with the rest, it was very one-note, and a less enjoyable reading experience as a result.
Overall an enjoyable read, though not one to eclipse Homesick Restaurant, which I still consider to be Tyler’s greatest achievement.