Among the ironies of Tyler’s reputation as a writer of domestic fiction is that she’s a shrewd observer of masculinityĪmong the ironies of Tyler’s reputation as a writer of domestic fiction – that loaded term – is that she’s a shrewd observer of masculinity. The rift, all the more severe for being largely unvoiced, only worsens when David, ready to high-tail it to university in 1970, is forced into a character-building summer job with one of Robin’s plumber friends, rather than volunteer with a community theatre group Robin wants to teach him that being a man means you can’t always choose. But Robin, a plumber turned shopkeeper, has other ideas, and his heavy-handed attempt to break David’s reluctance to swim will set family tensions simmering down the decades.Īs trauma plots go, it’s not exactly A Little Life, sure, but Tyler has a keen eye for the way small moments can have unpredictable effects in a family’s understanding of one another. We meet them on a rare holiday to a Maryland lake, with the girls in their teens and their younger brother a curious seven-year-old happiest playing make-believe with his toys.

Set, as usual, in Baltimore, it’s the story of the Garretts: husband and wife Robin and Mercy, children Alice, Lily and David. Responding to a question about whether Covid might break her aversion to putting topical elements in her work, she said: “It would derail the small private story I’m trying to tell.”Īfter her previous novel, the terrific Redhead By the Side of the Road, generously centred on the blinkered perspective of a middle-aged IT guy, French Braid returns to type: a multigenerational ensemble piece that will have fans marking their Tyler bingo cards, from empty nesters taking later-life left turns and family rifts surrounding odd-one-out siblings. We might fairly think that some of the things she has said in recent interviews aren’t exactly engraved in stone, not least because French Braid, a warm family saga set between 1959 and the late summer of 2020, appears to represent a U-turn on her intuition that “it’d be really wrongheaded of me to suddenly start talking about the coronavirus at this stage in one of my books”. T his, blessedly, is now Anne Tyler’s fourth novel since she suggested that 2015’s A Spool of Blue Thread was going to be her last.

Redhead by the side of the road