Tyler’s 22nd novel brims with the qualities that have brought her legions of fans and high critical acclaim. Characters pulse with lifelikeness. The tone flickers between humorous relish and sardonic shrewdness. Dialogue crackles with authenticity. Beneath it all is an insistence that it’s never too soon to recognize how quickly life can speed by and never too late to make vitalizing changes. Unillusioned but uncynical, fascinated by family dynamics and the tension between independence and involvement, Clock Dance is a warmly appealing tale of timely recuperation.
Like Dickens, Tyler sketches a well-peopled larger community, bustling with friends, lovers and bit players. But the book’s real action centers on Willa and how, in lending Denise and especially Cheryl some of her steadiness and predictability, she reclaims something of her younger self: a bolder, messier person than the superficial one she’d become, the 'cheery and polite and genteel' woman who ended up living near a golf course and wearing expensive clothes ...the novels of Anne Tyler seem simple because she makes the very difficult look easier than it is. Her books are smarter and more interesting than they might appear on the surface; then again, so are our mothers.
One of Ms. Tyler’s most appealing talents is difficult to illustrate in brief, as it’s typically the happy outcome of page after page of careful accretion: a gift for evoking the moment when the heart goes out, when a mute call for sympathy sparks a responsive note in another’s breast ... Clock Dance is a double Cinderella story. Readers will quickly gather that Willa has embarked—willy-nilly, not always consciously—on a psychic transformation. What clarifies more slowly is that Cheryl is likewise metamorphosing ... If Willa’s journey is ultimately less moving than, say, Macon’s in The Accidental Tourist, I blame Peter, Willa’s husband. He’s a good provider, I suppose, and intelligent and good-looking. But there’s nothing formidable about him, and Willa’s gradual emancipation from his self-absorption and condescension lacks the drama that might arise were he more oppressor than pest.
Unfortunately, Tyler doesn’t supply many incidents as unsettling as that encounter with the real or imagined hijacker. Instead, the first half of Clock Dance skates through the decades of Willa’s life, from childhood to motherhood to widowhood. Characters are introduced and cast off the way one might rifle through old clothes in the attic—with the same amused sense of familiarity. If these chapters aren’t wholly engaging, at least they’re great for Anne Tyler Bingo Night ... Even as the story moves into the 21st century, it still feels fusty, like an antique speculation about how people might live in the year 2017 ... Still, despite those sepia tones, Clock Dance finally starts to work in its second half when all its largely superfluous foundation-setting is mercifully finished ... Tyler’s novels may feel too conciliatory toward the strictures of domestic life, too free of erotic energy to be feminist works, but her stories are often concerned with the central challenge of the feminist movement: How to imagine and then inhabit possibilities beyond those circumscribed by convention?
Tyler offers yet another astute portrait in Clock Dance ... If the concluding pages are more circuitous than necessary, Tyler’s touch is as light and sure as ever. Clock Dance is a tender portrait of everyday people dealing with loss and regret, the need to feel useful and the desire for independence.
Clock Dance is a greatest-hits album in novel form. Anne Tyler’s latest book features most, if not all of her trademark themes and writerly quirks, and it moves briskly, but in absence throughout is a certain personality — a particularity ... the novel toggles between playing to Tyler’s strengths and going through the motions of her relatively threadbare story beats ... It’s that dreamy flow which, at her best, marks the author’s wisdom and vision as a chronicler of the human condition. But in Clock Dance it’s lacking in potency. Tyler seems anxious to keep things moving, more concerned with how character details and experiences fit together, puzzle-like, than really living in their humanity ... Clock Dance is perhaps ultimately an argument for seeing an uneven story of high potential through to its conclusion. This is a book that improves significantly as it progresses ... Rest assured, the dialogue is fun and snappy throughout; the final pages offer a warm and appropriately, exceedingly sentimental ending. Tyler still hits her marks.
Clock Dance is Tyler's 22nd novel, and it's immediately identifiable as her work. This is not a condemnation: Tyler has been examining the quirks of American domestic life with insight and humor for decades. Her novels, which include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Breathing Lessons, are funny and warm but also shrewd in the way they reflect our maddening, imperfect lives. The opening chapters explore scenes from Willa's youth and young adulthood, but like Willa, the novel blossoms only once the story lands in Baltimore, a city that Tyler has staked out as her own.
...it seems patent to me that Anne Tyler is the most dependably rewarding novelist now at work in our country ... One of Ms. Tyler’s most appealing talents is difficult to illustrate in brief, as it’s typically the happy outcome of page after page of careful accretion: a gift for evoking the moment when the heart goes out, when a mute call for sympathy sparks a responsive note in another’s breast ... In her fertility, she has created a series of worlds giving onto a larger world, one governed by its own pattern of artistic and emotional expectations. Fans can speak meaningfully of an 'Anne Tyler novel'—as you might of a Faulkner novel.
Clock Dance runs with well-calibrated efficiency; it pulls you right in and keeps on ticking. Like many Tyler novels, including her most recent...it spans decades in the life of its sympathetic main character. It is also filled with Tyler’s wry perspective on appealingly quirky, so-called ordinary people ... The setup is ripe for sly commentary on human behavior, as willing Willa and petulant Peter move into Denise’s shabby house. No surprise: Willa connects easily with preternaturally capable little Cheryl, who has learned to compensate for her mother’s shortcomings, just as Willa did with hers. Tyler tries to keep their relationship crisp, but she doesn’t always win the struggle over mawkishness ... Once again, she throws light on the human condition by zeroing in on the quotidian concerns of people living quiet, unassuming lives in small, tightknit communities and makeshift, unconventional families.
Willa Drake, the protagonist in her latest novel, Clock Dance, feels like a character we already know — and one we’re delighted to meet again ... Tyler uses 100 pages to set up why Willa is the way she is. It’s at times a long slog, often filled with people and incidents that seem to bear no impact on the story Tyler’s telling. The payoff comes when the story jumps to 2017, and Willa’s awakening begins ... What’s so amazing about Tyler’s novels is the way she makes ordinary people and ordinary things so fascinating ... In Tyler’s hands, life’s mundane activities feel vital. Her imperfect but lovable characters are people who act and feel like us ... It may be hard for some readers to embrace Clock Dance, the story of one somewhat privileged woman’s longing for a more satisfying life ... Readers who make the effort, though, will enjoy Willa’s journey.
It is something of a triumph...that Anne Tyler’s Clock Dance, a novel that has Willa for its heroine, doesn’t read like a portrait of a dishrag. Rather, it’s a psychologically astute study of an intelligent, curious woman who spends decades playing the good-girl role that one man after another expects of her ... when the phone rings one summer day and a stranger in Maryland asks if she can fly there immediately to look after a 9-year-old named Cheryl, Willa says yes ... The one rickety section of the book is where Tyler has to set this implausible scenario in motion. It takes a little while for her to channel a persuasive voice for the precocious Cheryl, and for us to stop wondering: What in the world is Willa doing there? ... It’s a bit of an Our Town situation, in that everyone has a role. Playing sweet and dithery won’t cut it, though. The time has come for Willa to recast herself. Let the awakening begin.
She is one of our greatest living fiction writers and if I were in charge, she’d have a Nobel by now ... One of Tyler’s many fantastic strengths has always been her ability to manage a great number of characters in the same space, choreographing them to bounce off one another in ways that are both enthralling and convincing. But here, despite a somewhat unrewarding subplot about the shooting...the chit-chat all too easily descends into tedium ... I finished this novel wishing I could take her back to that wonderfully unsettling earlier moment and beg her to make Willa scream and then see what happened next.
Anne Tyler...is still adopting guileless, melancholy characters and setting them on quixotic courses ... closely observed depictions of people and place are the rewards of a Tyler novel ... But Clock Dance isn’t all charming eccentricity. Tyler’s characters live in real time, challenged by absent parents and troublesome kids. They face racism, misogyny, random violence. They suffer myriad forms of loneliness and develop compassion for themselves and others ... Tensions hover. Who shot Denise? Why? When can she manage on her own? ... Loyal Peter waits impatiently in their comfortable, quiet home with her beloved saguaro cactus. Ticktock. How can a person decide?
...an especially lithe and enlivening tale ... Tyler’s bedazzling yet fathoms-deep feel-good novel is wrought with nimble humor, intricate understanding of emotions and family, place and community—and bounteous pleasure in quirkiness, discovery, and renewal.
Power dynamics are never simple in Tyler’s portraits of marriage, and when Willa needs to, she quietly gets what she wants. As she gets to know Denise’s prematurely mature daughter, Cheryl, and the array of eccentric folks on their slightly seedy block—all vibrantly portrayed with Tyler’s usual low-key gusto and bracingly dark humor—readers will want Willa to see that others appreciate her sly wit and tolerant acceptance of people’s foibles as whiny Peter does not. But will she? Tyler drags out the suspense a tad longer than the slight plot merits.
More predictable and less profound than her most recent full-scale work... but Tyler’s characteristic warmth and affection for her characters are as engaging as ever.
...a bittersweet, hope-filled look at two quirky families that have broken apart and are trying to find their way back to one another ... The cast of sharply drawn characters dominates in ways both reflective and raucous across a series of emotional events, such as Willa’s baffling encounter with a would-be hijacker, a heartbreaking moment with her elderly dad, and the jolting advice she receives from a kindhearted doctor. It’s a stellar addition to Tyler’s prodigious catalogue.
