Families are such funny things. Find a man in his late thirties or early forties surrounded by his kids. Around them, he is the paterfamilias. The Father. The Ultimate Authority (besides Mom). Now transfer him to his family of origin and watch him interact with them. There he’s not recognized as a dad but as a brother or child and the definition has an effect on his personality. His air of authority is gone. Maybe an old squabble is raked up with a sibling. If his children are watching, they have a rare glimpse of their Dad as a boy, momentarily spinning like an electron from their immediate family into the family of their grandparents. Around the molecules of generations, Dad becomes a covelant bond. As a writer, Anne Tyler knows this better than most and the idea stands out in her novel, A Spool of Blue Thread. This is the story of the Whitshanks, another eccentric Baltimore family (Anne is the literary patron saint of both the city and eccentric families) with an recurring, dynamic. Each generation has one member with the drive to attain a goal above their expectations even though success will not make them happy. Every…
I love the work of Anne Tyler. Her prose is open, direct, kind and she writes about the people I know. Her characters are the Americans I grew up around, people from the working and upper-middle class who lives are usually defined by geographical boundaries and aspirations. These are not the folks who dream of learning a second language, becoming famous or climbing Everest. These are the middle-class, middle-income, middle everything Americans. (God love us, we can be so boring at times.) Anne sees our faults and our fears and still loves us (especially those from her native Baltimore) but her novels tend to disarrange our neat little worlds. Underneath her open sentences are some serious ideas and I like the way she displays them. Most readers know her more famous books, Breathing Lessons and The Accidental Tourist but my favorite has, I think, the quintessential Anne Tyler title: Saint Maybe. Set in the early 1960’s, the Bedloes are convinced they are the prototype of a American family. They are an established family in a well-settled neighborhood and their youngest son, Ian, seems the most well-sorted of all. His looks, brains and sports ability are all better than average, though…