Anne Tyler’s latest novel ‘A spool of blue thread’ is indeed richly threaded with all of the homely adroitness for which she is acclaimed. This is another of her family sagas written with the sort of light finesse that most writers should envy. One turns to Tyler not for grand structure, haughtiness of tone, or verbose magnificence, but for cadenced gaiety. She communicates, chiefly, a relish for the simple things. The inclusion of this novel in the Booker 2015 shortlist comes as no surprise then for it is a work of a both sharp and dulcet tones, and is a pleasure to read for its almost, salubrious old fashioned-ness.
The Pulitzer Prize winner spins an entirely light-filled plot revolving around the Whitshank family, who are resident in Tyler’s beloved Baltimore. At the heart of the family we have the story of Abby, the matriarch of the bunch who begins life as a bohemian, flighty youth. ‘She insisted on natural childbirth, served her family wheat germ and home-brewed yogurt, marched against the Vietnam war with her youngest astride her hip, sent her children to public schools. Her house was filled with her handicrafts-macabre plant hangers and colourful wove serapes. She took in strangers off the streets and some of them stayed for weeks. There was no telling who would show up at her dinner table’.
Tyler is not interested in high-gloss declarative love. Instead, like ‘a spool of thread’ she charts the slow unwinding of such confluence, those patched wounds, the bound seam
Later, in seniority, this sensitive hippie settles into a contented drowsy scattiness, with most of her family still ensconced in their hometown and the familial hearth. Apart from Abby, Tyler’s eye is also trained to the form of Abby’s son Danny, throughout the text, who provides the archetype of the self-confessed ‘black-sheep’ of the family. As an adolescent, he is prone to all of sorts of devilishness, getting a girl pregnant and ‘the smoking, truancy, the pot. Twice he got in trouble with the police. His hair was unwashed, ropy with grease, he could have been homeless. A blood member of the Whitshank family, one of those enviable families that radiate clannishness and specialness; but the trailed around their edges like some sort of charity case’. Though her observations may be astute, Tyler falls short of besmirching the Whitshanks’ with the taint of sordid dysfunction or the ghosts of serious resentments. It seems she loves all her characters into gestures of sincere devotion, lending the world their skewed and worn treasures exultantly, in a plot progression that is entirely butterfly-agile. Thus, in this manner Denny is absolved of sheer, profane truant-hood and his family absolved of the guiltless tyranny of narcissism (they admit later on that Denny was Abby’s favourite child). Tyler shuns the novelists ploy of conviction-making, she cannot bring herself to admit of lovelessness; ultimately she is a writer overcome with love-fables.
Tyler is not interested in high-gloss declarative love. Instead, like ‘a spool of thread’ she charts the slow unwinding of such confluence, those patched wounds, the bound seam. Love, she says, must be kept close to the heart, and should be regarded not as intoxicant but as elixir. There is also the love Abby has for her adoptive son Stem to consider. The latter has been abandoned by his mother and suddenly orphaned when his tile-layer father dies while in the employment of Red, the family patriarch. At a moment when they are still unsure if they will be able to accommodate tiny Stem, Abby comes upon him one night, sitting on his bed. What follows is a moment, where Abby simply recognises Stem as her own; a kind of divine entitlement befalls her before the conception of severance, can plausibly germinate. ‘I saw the back of his neck, this fragile slender stem of a neck and it struck me all at once that there was nobody anywhere, any place on this planet, who would look at that little neck and just have to reach out and cup a hand behind it. You know how you just have to touch your child sometimes? How you drink him in and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is?’ The startling magic of this moment is marvellously related, even hypnotic. Tyler steers us to hope, faultlessly, like clockwork.
Kinship has nothing to do with blood, Tyler seems to reiterate, for the Whitshanks’ love for Stem might be the one they take for granted, while their love for Denny is envisioned with clouds on the horizon, meanderingly brought to a prism here and there, though dimmed mostly by the travails of creating patience. At one point in the story a septuagenarian Abby muses, on the continually restless Denny, ‘You wake up in the morning, you’re feeling fine but all at once you think Something’s not right. Something’s off somewhere, what is it? And then you remember that it’s your child — whichever one is unhappy’. No matter how tempestuous the journey, there must be togetherness, urges Tyler. There must be that temple of sympathy to which we can return ceaselessly, as Denny is ultimately shown to do. Home, she says, is the sacred plot, plagued with tedium and loss, perhaps, but shielding you from loneliness; the kind of loneliness that is definitive, that truly counts.
Towards the end of the novel we are led back in time to the period of Abby and Red’s courtship. Tinged with all kinds of mellifluous nuances, the kind in which Tyler revels, we see Abby’s focus of affection drawn from the neighbourhood’s James Dean’ to the bright goodness of Red
Towards the end of the novel we are led back in time to the period of Abby and Red’s courtship. Tinged with all kinds of mellifluous nuances, the kind in which Tyler revels, we see Abby’s focus of affection drawn from the neighbourhood’s James Dean’ to the bright goodness of Red. The day this occasion takes place is painted in halcyon strokes. ‘It was the prettiest afternoon. All breezy and yellow-green with a sky the unreal blue of a Noxzema jar’. We are swept away by Abby’s youthful honesty and her innocent ‘saving up’ of her burgeoning ardour by ‘hugging it close to her heart’. Abby scuttles into love with the delicate stubbornness of a seer and returns to that moment of captivation throughout her life. It is the tale told around the Whitshank hearth, the sort of story that delivers that glow of plenitude to the humblest of abodes. Tyler indulges us thoroughly with the kind of picturesque Americana, the kind of godly enthusiasm and positivity, for which she is rightfully beloved.
Tyler’s genius, then, lies in her painstaking and limpidly sketched, understatement. What we must seek in her oeuvre of work is the kind of nurture real life can’t afford. Yes, she seems to say all families have calamity lurking at their heels, but must we allow ourselves to be drowned in foreboding? Even as Abby dies and the Whitshanks are utterly thrown, bewildered, Tyler’s beneficent gaze delivers them to cohesion, and decisively, gratitude. Tyler is certain, through her portrayal of strange Denny, that we mustn’t allow the differences in our natures to mar the Technicolor of all this pernicious, voluptuous living. Tyler invites us to spoil ourselves in her nurture, she invites us to try living with that stunning airiness with which she furls her world, under the old sun.
A Spool of Blue Thread
Anne Tyler
358pp,
Chatto & Windus £15.99
Available at Readings and The Last Word
