![]() ![]() ![]() The son who has most tormented his mother most colonises her heart. But what she has that neither Robinson nor Munro possess to the same degree is an irrepressible sense of the comedy beneath even the most melancholy surface – or sometimes peeking just above it – in human affairs. Tyler is in the top rank of American writers, and moments in this novel have an affinity with Canada’s Alice Munro too. Denny, 19 when the story starts, something of a prodigal son, is reminiscent in his charming, maddening, potentially delinquent way – balanced bewilderingly yet convincingly between helpfulness and fecklessness – of Jack, the returning bad lot in Marilynne Robinson’s Home. The novel is a portrait of the Whitshank family across several generations. ![]() The book is no less eventful than ordinary life – and that turns out to be more than enough. ![]() What is most remarkable about it is the extent to which Tyler is able to relax into an ordinary, homely minor key while keeping one as absorbed as if it were one’s own family she were describing, and as if what happened to them were necessary reading. A Spool of Blue Thread, her 20th, is no exception. The extraordinary thing about all her writing is the extent to which she makes one believe every word, deed and breath. Breathing Lessons was the name of Anne Tyler’s 11th novel – but she has never needed to be taught how to give her characters life. ![]()
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