FRENCH BRAID
ANNE TYLER
Chatto & Windus, 244pp, £16.99
What makes a family work – or not work? It is the intricate pleating of strands of lives that create a family. Jessie Thompson, in the Evening Standard, enjoyed French Braid, Anne Tyler’s keenly observed new novel about a family through seven decades. ‘Nothing deeply traumatic happens in this family – in fact, it’s the nothingness that conjures a kind of unshiftable cloud of pain and loss.’ We meet the Garretts who are a family that don’t really know each other, nor what to say to one another. Thompson liked Tyler’s gentle observations of the all too familiar that capture the reader: ‘Sentences appear that seem simple and then suddenly break your heart.’
This is about ‘empty nesters taking later-life left turns and family rifts surrounding odd-one-out siblings, ’ summarised Anthony Cummins in the Guardian. ‘Funny, poignant, generous, not shying away from death and disappointment but never doomy or overwrought, it suggests there’s always new light to be shed, whatever the situation, with just another turn of the prism.’
Jennifer Haigh in the saw something new in Tyler’s latest novel. ‘She is no longer quite so interested in the details. offers something subtler and finer, the long view on family: what remains years later, when the particulars have been sanded away by time. The tone is wistful, elegiac.’ For her, this long view has produced a novel about ‘what is remembered, what we’re left with when all the choices have been made, the children raised, the dreams realised or abandoned. It is a moving meditation on the passage of time.’
