For Tyler fans, this is familiar territory: the quotidian frictions and rewards of family life in white, middle-class Baltimore. But while her earlier novels were heavy on domestic details, vividly evoking the texture of daily life, French Braid is less fully imagined, the characters less developed. There are simply too many years to cover, too many children and grandchildren to keep track of. The younger Garretts are drawn haphazardly, or not at all. Five decades into her career, one gets the sense that Tyler is no longer quite so interested in the details. Instead, French Braid offers something subtler and finer, the long view on family: what remains years later, when the particulars have been sanded away by time. The tone is wistful, elegiac ... French Braid is a novel about what is remembered, what we’re left with when all the choices have been made, the children raised, the dreams realized or abandoned. It is a moving meditation on the passage of time ... French Braid is the opposite of reassuring. The novel is imbued with an old-school feminism of a kind currently unfashionable. It looks squarely at the consequences of stifled female ambition — to the woman herself, and to those in her orbit. For all its charm, French Braid is a quietly subversive novel, tacklinging fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging ... Tyler takes aim at a sentimental trope deeply embedded in American culture. The feminist movement notwithstanding, popular culture...still clings to the notion of motherhood as the ultimate emotional fulfillment, the great and crowning satisfaction of a woman’s life. For Mercy Garrett, that simply isn’t the case.
Few writers are so widely loved and respected as the creator of 'family novels', a genre Tyler has perfected by bringing her quiet wisdom and gentle prose style to bear on the hidden corners of domestic life. She has strayed into slightly more diverse territory recently, but her fans will be delighted to know that her latest book marks a return to the form of her most popular work ... This is Tyler at her most Tyler-ish: pleasant and inoffensive, yet surprisingly deep and moving. Critics who write her off as folksy might remember that folk tales, with their dark hearts, endure longer and cut deeper than more sophisticated forms. So will the work of this beloved teller of secret, ordinary truths.
The story offers such a complete checklist of the author’s usual motifs and themes that it could serve as the Guidebook to Anne Tyler in the Wild. The insular Baltimore family, the quirky occupations, the special foods — they all move across these pages as predictably as the phases of the moon ... There are times when such familiarity might feel tiresome. But we’re not in one of those times. Indeed, given today’s slate of horror and chaos, the rich melody of French Braid offers the comfort of a beloved hymn. It doesn’t even matter if you believe in the sanctity of family life; the sound alone brings solace ... With exquisite subtlety, this early chapter lays down the psychological trajectories of several storylines that develop throughout French Braid. It’s also a reminder that. although Tyler has devoted her life to novels, she commands all the tools of a brilliant short story writer ... Now 80 years old, Tyler can move freely up and down the scale of ages with complete authority, capturing the patient spirit of a retiree, the buoyant expectation of a second-grader or the unstable realm of naivete and dread where teenagers hang out ... Who captures that poignant paradox so well as Anne Tyler, our patron saint of the unremarked outlandishness of ordinary life?
French Braid, spans over sixty years in the lives of a Baltimore family and displays [Tyler's] typically astute attention to how seemingly small moments and insignificant events resonate over time to shape identities both personal and familial ... Because this is an Anne Tyler novel, there is no festering secret, no dramatic wrongdoing or dark mystery to be uncovered. Instead, Tyler will slowly and painstakingly show us how minor hurts and disappointments add up incrementally over long periods of time, how estrangement happens slowly, almost imperceptibly, and how ties thus made fragile nonetheless bind very different people in a family together ... The novel’s plaited narrative perspectives enable readers to observe the characters from multiple vantage points, in effect from within different frameworks of understanding and explanation, so that a figure who first appears to be an X is later revealed to be also or instead a Y. We watch them develop interestingly over time in ways that both confirm and undermine earlier impressions and tendencies. But the technique also requires that we are held at a bit of a remove and prevented from investing in the characters with the fullest enthusiasm ... Despite its many virtues, French Braid is on the whole a rather wan outing for Tyler.
This, blessedly, is now Anne Tyler’s fourth novel since she suggested that 2015’s A Spool of Blue Thread was going to be her last ... French Braid returns to type: a multigenerational ensemble piece that will have fans marking their Tyler bingo cards ... Tyler has a keen eye for the way small moments can have unpredictable effects in a family’s understanding of one another ... Among the ironies of Tyler’s reputation as a writer of domestic fiction – that loaded term – is that she’s a shrewd observer of masculinity ... The novel [has a] nicely relaxed sense that Tyler isn’t squeezing her characters into a design so much as just letting them be. And yet there’s nothing slack about it ... French Braid may not upend a fan’s ranking of Tyler’s novels...but it’s thoroughly enjoyable, and at this point any Tyler book is a gift. Funny, poignant, generous, not shying away from death and disappointment but never doomy or overwrought, it suggests there’s always new light to be shed, whatever the situation, with just another turn of the prism.
It must be one of the great pleasures in life: to be, let’s say, a third of the way through a new book by Anne Tyler ... You do know that you are in the safest of hands, and you have a new world to inhabit, new people to watch and listen to, eat dinner with, and try to understand ... Tyler’s handling of different narrative viewpoints is subtle and powerful, shifting the balance of the story each time. Just as we feel clear in our assessment of a character, we are gradually, almost imperceptibly, given access to their thoughts and forced to reassess ... Modern life has been gradually filtering into Anne Tyler’s novels for decades, not least because a general widening of inclusivity fits with her sensibilities, but it turns out she can do current affairs, too, if she chooses. This is her twenty-fourth book, a multi-layered and masterly exercise in sympathy and understanding, and she is still extending her powers.
Each chapter leaps forward chronologically to show the family at a new stage and from a different viewpoint. This keeps the novel physically compact, despite its ambitious temporal span ... Tyler’s writing is as steadfastly unshowy as the characters she depicts, its power deriving from the patient accumulation of telling detail. Personality reveals itself almost entirely through action, with the reader left to infer interior motivation, conscious or otherwise. Authorial interjections are kept firmly in check. It’s an approach that can tip into blandness at times and make Tyler’s novels feel plot-heavy, overly freighted with factual descriptions. But here, sharp focus and shifts in time keep the story airborne ... Tyler is especially good on the balance of the 'little kindnesses' and 'little cruelties' that suffuse familial relationships. Her portrayal of the bonds forged across the generations between grandparents and grandchildren is tender and acute ... French Braid is a novel full of compassion for the human condition by a writer confident enough not to pin everything down and to trust her story to work its quiet magic.
Families, as Tyler has shown so brilliantly over her long career — she is 80 now — are private, convoluted things, twisted and knotted together over generations like a braid. And not even a simple three-strand braid; more like a complicated French braid, one that takes in more and more strands as it progresses ... French Braid is filled with piercing observation.
Entrancing ... Nobody writes better about families than Anne Tyler. Moreover she has a gift denied many novelists of writing sympathetically about people who lead apparently humdrum lives and who would be unlikely, many of them anyway, to read much, certainly not her kind of intelligent, probing novel ... Tyler presents her characters both as they see themselves and as others see them. Bringing off this double vision is very difficult. Few have managed it better than Jane Austen ... She has the lightest touch ... It is a measure of Tyler’s skill and her uncanny lightness of touch that I guess her treatment of the pandemic will seem fictional rather than journalistic/historical when people read this novel a couple of generations from now. There will surely be such readers if there are still readers of any novels then. Tyler has that rare ability to do much with what seems little, to bring the ordinary and usually unregarded lives of ordinary people to life and make them matter.
... effortlessly spans six decades ... As plot strands go it is deftly done: witty, poignant, wry — and sort of radical ... Tyler’s genius lies in the subtlety with which she portrays her characters’ internal worlds ... vintage Tyler: accessible, comforting, driven by humanity. Her novels can feel repetitive — the same kindly middle-class Americans grappling with the same essential conundrum of how to live a decent life in a confusing world. But then, why not? Tyler’s fellow American Ann Patchett once said that every author has only one story, which they write repeatedly. You get away with this 24 times, though, only if you have a genuine streak of genius.
Tyler’s 24th novel is the latest addition to the remarkable human comedy she has spun over the last half century, mainly set in Baltimore. It is an artful mix of several recurrent elements in her work, along with some new twists, including the coronavirus pandemic. The appeal, as always, is in being privy to the feelings, insecurities, uncertainties, and peculiarities of ordinary people who come alive in Tyler’s hands. The wonder of French Braid is the easygoing fluidity with which Tyler jumps and floats between characters and decades to create what in the end is a deftly crafted family portrait that spans some 70 years ... what a wonderful litter she’s sent out into the world.
At first glance, the new novel by Anne Tyler, French Braid, breaks all the rules of exemplary fiction. The opening page is so mundane and forgettable, it would be buzzed offstage in a First Page competition at any writing festival. There’s little action, nothing at stake, and it is filled with recent backstory that includes a lot of names ... the result is a push-me pull-you narrative that never quite finds its forward drive ... Oh, if we could only have heard a specific thought, or even one, complicated, conflicting conundrum we might feel something for these characters ... At the end of the book, there is a sense of time, of decades, of generations having gone by—and this forgettable family simply shrinks back into their faded, predictable photos.
... the insistent unmasking of the ordinary to reveal the subtly tragic makes the book shine ... charming, wryly humorous ... classic Anne Tyler, almost to a fault—if writing about middle-class America in a realist fashion is some sort of sin. The fact that she makes the little things seem larger (more important) than large things gives her novels a unique air and grounds them in the world around us. A world that we recognize and see even more clearly than before ... The strained relationships between Tyler’s characters may seem ordinary or unworthy of illustration, but they function as the cement of the life portrayed in the pages—holding together the plot ... collects the stories that might escape telling around the campfire or kitchen table as well as those that are so rehashed they’ve become a family legend. Tyler takes these stories, familiar to most in one way or the other, and creates a family quilt that stretches several generations ... Though the themes undertaken are old territory, they are cozy, creating a pleasant and pleasurable read for old fans and new admirers.
Oh, the lengths this family would go to so as not to spoil the picture of how things were supposed to be!' Tyler writes. It is lines like that one—seemingly tossed off by the omniscient narrator, a great skill of Tyler’s—that bring heft to this largely plotless book. French Braid is filled with piercing observation.
Anne Tyler is a master of interpersonal drama and intricate depictions of characters’ lives ... her skilled storytelling once again takes center stage as she reveals the minor family dramas that have resulted in Serena’s inability to positively identify her cousin ... As Tyler turns her attention to each Garrett, she reveals finely honed character portraits ... Each chapter is as well-crafted as a short story and reveals the heart of its central character. Tyler weaves these individual tales together to build something even greater, and like the braid of the novel’s title, this interpersonal family drama becomes more substantial as its pieces combine.
I got the distinct sensation of leafing through someone’s thick photo album. So your enjoyment of this book (and her work in general) is dependent on how well you tolerate other peoples’ family snapshots. What they reveal, what they don’t ... Most readers will smile at the dynamics of Garrett family get-togethers ... It’s not surprising Anne Tyler – who has in the past received gentle criticism for her 'too sweet' stories – ends with optimism and warmth. Puppies, gardens, happy grandparents.
This scope offers much for the reader, not least varying perspectives within one family on seminal moments (a summer holiday; the last child leaving for college; a surprise 50th-anniversary party) and on the smaller, seemingly insignificant things ... But while the breadth of French Braid is to be commended, the depth of experience doesn’t quite match ... This is familiar Tyler terrain, the meshing of ordinary and extraordinary. It results in a thought-provoking, eminently readable novel, one where the Baltimore author’s trademark perception and eye for life’s absurdities are in abundance ... French Braid ambles along for its early sections, giving the reader time to get comfortable in family life ... although this book may not have the heft of some of her others, it is an engaging, enjoyable read, full of wisdom and fine feeling on family life.
In this quiet but emotionally astute story, she follows the lives of Robin and Mercy Garrett and their progeny over more than six decades, gently evoking the extraordinary in the most ordinary moments ... She expertly renders the Garretts’ history in a handful of observant set pieces —among them an awkward Easter dinner and a 50th wedding anniversary celebration — that reveal both the love and tension that rest uneasily aside each other in this unexceptional family ... Tyler is the kind of writer who sneaks up on the reader before delivering a real emotional punch ... Virtually anyone who has experienced the pleasures and pains of family life will find something to identify with.
In the Garrett family, each person is an island, mysterious and self-contained, yet, as Tyler reveals so deftly, all are inextricably connected. Her latest Baltimore-anchored, lushly imagined, psychologically intricate, virtually inhalable novel is a stepping-stone tale, with each finely composed section (after the opening scene) jumping forward in time, generation by generation ... At every leap, Tyler balances gracefully between tenderness and piquant humor, her insights into human nature luminous ... Tyler is a phenomenon, each of her novels fresh and incisive, and this charming family tale will be honey for her fans.
After finishing French Braid, the 24th novel from the formidable American novelist, I was going about my life thinking nothing particularly radical had happened to me. And then I thought about it, and I thought about it some more, and I realised – boom – she really is a master ... It’s another of Tyler’s extraordinarily unshowy but devastating moments of indicating a family that will do strange things out of love for one another ... It’s the idea of family itself, something that has always provided such rich material for Tyler, which seems to weigh down so heavily on the Garretts ... But in each of these chapters comes a quiet moment of emotional truth – a grandmother encouraging her granddaughter’s curiosity about art, or a usually reticent brother’s unfiltered outpouring of love for his new wife – that catches us the reader off guard as much as it does the characters.
What Tyler does so well is to arrange set pieces that serve to represent the intricate way the family evolves over time ... French Braid finishes with a new generation of Garretts getting on in a world that has been changed dramatically by the pandemic. We realise that, through this study of a family, we’ve been delivered something larger and more ambitious: a portrait of a nation at a time of crisis ... French Braid is a family saga of uncommon subtlety and grace, a novel which shows that, at 80, Anne Tyler is still amongst the very best writers around.
There is a phenomenon at work when the quietest possible story with the sparest of plots still compels a reader to sit for hours and let the tale unspool in its own time, content to see where it will go next — even when it’s clear the path is through familiar territory...Ah, we must be reading Anne Tyler ... Tyler offers literary comfort food without apology ... Still, there’s a perpetual edge to her stories. In Tyler’s fictional families, if anyone actually serves milk and cookies, there’s something vaguely discomfiting about it.
While accusations of being formulaic hold some truth, the book is perceptive and relatable underneath its 'milk and cookies exterior ... The [characters are] introduced, after a slow and somewhat aslant introductory chapter, as they embark on their first ever family holiday. This neatly sets up the interpersonal dynamics and lays the foundations for the perfectly unremarkable, perfectly believable events that follow ... It’s this family love that shines through in the book. The Garretts may be dysfunctional and disconnected, but Tyler convincingly shows that, to loop back to the book’s opening chapter, there’s more than one way of being close.
A dry and well-crafted look at a family that inexplicably comes apart over several decades ... There are no big reveals, but Tyler’s focus on character development proves fruitful; a reunion organized by the wistful Robin in the ’90s is particularly affecting, as is a coda with David during the Covid-19 pandemic. As always, Tyler offers both comfort and surprise.
Tyler once again unravels the tangled threads of family life ... This familiar subject always seems fresh in her hands because Tyler draws her characters and their interactions in such specific and revealing detail ... More lovely work from Tyler, still vital and creative at 80.
