It’s a remarkable development, not least because it takes the rest of the family quite a while to catch on.įor Tyler fans, this is familiar territory: the quotidian frictions and rewards of family life in white, middle-class Baltimore. Mercy rents a painting studio a few blocks away and quietly “leaves” Robin by gradually moving her possessions there. Only after her youngest leaves for college do her aspirations resurface. Mercy Garrett is a frustrated artist who, after a year and a half of art school in Baltimore, shelved her dream of studying in Paris, married decent, reliable Robin and raised three children. Like them, she is interested in the tension between freedom and intimacy, personal fulfillment and the demands of family life. Tyler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, is at heart a 20th-century realist, a younger contemporary of John Updike, Richard Yates and Alice Munro. What emerges is a kind of forensic examination of Garrett family relations, a look at how their elliptical style of interaction came to be. Tyler proceeds to check in on them once every decade or so, always at some moment of transition. Our first glimpse of the Garrett clan comes in 1959, as the cousins’ grandparents, Robin and Mercy, take a rare family vacation with their children. Spanning 60 years and multiple generations, it offers a diffuse, affectionate portrait of the Garretts, a loving but aloof family in which nearly everything is left unsaid. The roots of this familial distance are the central concern of “French Braid,” the 24th novel by the beloved Baltimore novelist Anne Tyler.
Her uncertainty shocks her traveling companion - the boyfriend whose own close-knit family she has just met. She suspects - but isn’t sure - that he is her first cousin Nicholas.
In the opening pages of “French Braid,” a Baltimore college student spots a familiar-looking man in a train station.
0 kommentar(er)
