A svelte, finely constructed novel ... In my carping youth, I regarded the recurrent elements of Anne Tyler’s stories as a flaw. But I’ve grown to see her decades-long focus on quirky families and wounded people as no more limiting than the rules for writing a sonnet. With a sufficiently powerful microscope, a drop of water reveals the ocean.
This is not Tyler’s best novel, nor is it her worst, though it’s closer to the bottom than to the top ... Three Days in June is the sort of novel in which characters get pretty excited about microwaving a pair of potpies ... The pages did not turn themselves, but it is good enough that I did not resent my fingers for doing the job.
Slender, compassionate ... Droll, often sardonic ... Tyler is a master chronicler of melancholy so there’s far more emotional heft in the novel’s counterpoint—the story of Gail and Max’s courtship and marriage and the surprising, not wholly believable event that torpedoed things. Perhaps because some of its quirkiness feels performative and forced, Three Days in June never quite satisfies. It’s rather like a piece of wedding cake—sweet but really kind of bland.
A valentine to readers. It’s funny and touching ... It’s the literary equivalent of a box of chocolates with no duds. ... If you’re looking for a deeply humane writer abounding in wit and wisdom, read Anne Tyler.
Like reading a hug ... A high-octane thriller this is not, but Three Days is as compelling as one. Tyler’s pacing is incomparable. She knows just when to make revelations for maximum devastation. Quietly, though. She’s never flashy.
For more than 60 years her clear-eyed but kindly approach to people moving through recognisable daily life has enabled her to serve up a wholly convincing combination of sharpness, tenderness, mild satire and rueful comedy, not just in a single book, but sometimes in a single sentence ... Defiantly unchanged.
Even by Tyler’s standards, Three Days in June is small in both scale and scope. In well under 200 pages, it follows Gail Baines through the day before, the day of and the day after her daughter Debbie’s wedding to Kenneth. Those few days, however, carry the resonance of the years that preceded them, details of which are deftly woven into the central narrative through reminiscences and flashbacks ... Because we’re reading Anne Tyler, there is little suspense about what will happen, but there’s a great deal of satisfaction in seeing it through.
t says everything about Tyler’s talents as a novelist that both outcomes are equally plausible and equally possible, until the very last word of the very last sentence of this wise, wonderful book.
With every character, cat included, incisively and vividly realized, and myriad preoccupations and emotions limned with nimble wit and empathy, this is a keen delight.
With a characteristic grace that combines economy of language and keen observation of the endearing oddities of middle-class American life, Tyler...guides the plot over some of the usual speed bumps that appear when not merely a couple, but their families along with them, are united by marriage. Three Days in June is a story about love in different forms, but at its heart it's a compassionate portrait of how muddling through may just turn out to be the path to happiness.
Tyler once again has opened the life of an outwardly held-back woman—with no people skills, the Headmistress had told her—to reveal the layers that she has put away for years. Gail's story is beautifully told, showing quiet passion and acknowledging what her world has become and how she arrived there.
