As I read, they all felt very real and immediate to me, but I already can’t recall their stories with much specificity. It’s just more or less ordinary people, with their quirks and aspirations and successes and failures and dislikes and loyalties, getting through their lives as best they can. There are no extremes in it (or in any of Tyler’s novels)-no real highs, no real lows. Like many of Tyler’s novels, it’s a small-scale family saga, here the interwoven stories of three generations. I liked it a lot, because it’s the kind of thing I like. (I was irked by Toby Litt’s snide comment in A Writer’s Diary that Sarah Waters always writes the same book?!) But I also have to concede that there is some truth in that complaint, because the scale and the tone and even, to some extent, the characters in Tyler’s fiction are pretty similar.įor that reason I don’t actually have much to say about French Braid. I don’t think that’s exactly fair, or at least it’s no more true of her than of many other writers who have found their voice, or their niche - “his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée,” as Henry James puts it. I have heard the criticism that Tyler always writes the same novel. Reading a new Anne Tyler novel always feels familiar, like coming home again-which is also, aptly enough, often the theme of her novels. All the essentials were there now, and even those seemed excessive, because she’d envisioned her future life as taking place in an empty room. How long can it take to just go?) Then, the instant he was out of the house, she was off to her studio. (Oh, leave! Just leave! she told him in her mind.

She got up in the mornings and made Robin’s breakfast she tidied and bustled around until he went to work. For the next little bit, then, Mercy continued sleeping at home.

French braid a novel book review