Anne Tyler is the beloved author of more than twenty novels, including the Pulitzer Prize winning “Breathing Lessons” and “Dinner At the Homesick Restaurant.” Her latest novel, “French Braid,” spans over sixty years in the lives of a Baltimore family and displays her typically astute attention to how seemingly small moments and insignificant events resonate over time to shape identities both personal and familial.
We begin in 2010 in a Baltimore train station with graduate student Serena Drew, who spots a young man she believes might be her first cousin, Nicholas Garrett, in the hordes of travelers. Her boyfriend, James, is surprised by her inability to clearly identify the man as her cousin and even more by the fact that she hasn’t seen him in many years. “You guys give a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘once removed,’” he wryly observes, then only somewhat jokingly muses: “Maybe there’s some deep dark secret in your family’s past.”
As a little girl, Serena had wondered the same thing. Why were her parents, her aunt Alice, and her Uncle David, Nicholas’s father, so distant from each other? Was David adopted? Had he been “written out of a will that had included both his sisters”? “Or [was it that] some sort of family argument had spun wildly out of control, the sort where outrageous remarks were made that a person couldn’t forgive”? Young Serena “read a lot of novels” and her imagined scenarios reflect the fictions she’s consumed.
But because this is an Anne Tyler novel, there is no festering secret, no dramatic wrongdoing or dark mystery to be uncovered. Instead, Tyler will slowly and painstakingly show us how minor hurts and disappointments add up incrementally over long periods of time, how estrangement happens slowly, almost imperceptibly, and how ties thus made fragile nonetheless bind very different people in a family together.
When the novel’s first section from Serena’s perspective ends, we flash back, somewhat confusingly and abruptly, to the late 1950s in a section told from Alice’s perspective. From then on, “French Braid” proceeds chronologically forward, with leaps of as few as seven and as many as 12 years between the novel’s eight sections. Each section is told in the third person perspective of a different family member.
Section Two describes a Garrett family lake vacation in 1959 and establishes the fraught dynamic. Even as they gather for what’s intended to be a blissful summer idyll, each has his or her own agenda: Robin, who runs a plumbing supply business, his wife, Mercy, and their three children, teenagers Alice and Lily and 7-year-old David, emerge as discrete atoms, uncomfortable in each other’s presence and desperate for autonomy and freedom. Tensions abound — between the bookish Alice and her boy-crazy sister, Lily; between responsible and nurturing Alice and her flighty mother, who prances around in glamorous bathing suits “such as Esther Williams might wear,” skips out on family togetherness in order to sketch or paint, and fails to prepare family meals; between shy and reticent David and his aggressive father.
We next leap forward 11 years to September 1970, with Mercy and Robin confronting being empty nesters after David’s departure for college, and with Mercy deciding to rent, and then to occupy more and more permanently, a painting studio. Subsequent sections include one set on and around Easter 1982, told from Lily’s point of view; Mercy and Robin’s 50th anniversary in 1990, which burrows into Robin’s thoughts about his wife and children; and others refracted through the prisms of their grandchildren.
The novel’s final section, set during the first disorienting, terrifying months of the COVID-19 pandemic, dives at last into David’s interiority and his tender feelings for his wife, son, and young grandson. It is David who comes up with the somewhat corny analogy between a French braid and a family: “When she undid them, her hair would still be in ripples, little leftover squiggles, for hours and hours. That’s how families work. You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free; the ripples are crimped forever.”
The novel’s plaited narrative perspectives enable readers to observe the characters from multiple vantage points, in effect from within different frameworks of understanding and explanation, so that a figure who first appears to be an X is later revealed to be also or instead a Y. We watch them develop interestingly over time in ways that both confirm and undermine earlier impressions and tendencies. But the technique also requires that we are held at a bit of a remove and prevented from investing in the characters with the fullest enthusiasm. After the first 30 pages inside Serena’s head, the novel never really returns to her. She, and likewise the other characters, can feel more like a narrative phase — succeeding the previous and on the way to the next — and less like a full-fledged personality.
There is much to admire about “French Braid,” including what Cathleen Schine once described as Tyler’s effective “style without a style,” penetrating axioms about family (“this is what families do for each other — hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions”), and a final section about families during the pandemic that is truly moving. But despite its many virtues, “French Braid” is on the whole a rather wan outing for Tyler.
FRENCH BRAID
By Anne Tyler
Knopf, 256 pages, $27
Priscilla Gilman is a former professor of English literature at Yale University and Vassar College and the author of “The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy” and “The Critic’s Daughter” (forthcoming from Norton).