Bottom Line

A well written family drama about the Whitshank family that I never truly engaged with.

Representative Paragraph

One of the characters in the novel is the house on Bouton Road that was built and maintained by Junior Whitshank, Red’s father, for the Brill family.  It’s a house that Junior loves, that one day he dreams of moving into…

So Junior built the house for Mr. Brill. He built better than he’d ever built anything in his life. He niggled over every pantry shelf and cabinet knob. He argued against any request that struck him as cutting corners or lacking in good taste. Because taste, really, was the secret of Junior’s reputation. How he came by it nobody knew, but he had the most unerring nose for anything pretentious. No two-story columns for Junior! No la-di-da portes cochères, with their intimations of chauffeured limousines gliding up to let their passengers off! When Mr. Brill dared to broach the possibility of a U-shaped “carriageway” out front, Junior all but exploded. “Carriageway!” he said. “What in tarnation is that? You drive a Chrysler Airflow, not a coach-and-six!” (Or that was his report of the conversation, at least. He may very well have exaggerated his own outspokenness in the telling.) Then he went on to fantasize, at length and in loving detail, how visitors would approach the house. The driveway should run to the side, he said, for the sole use of the Brill family. Guests should park down on the street. Picture how they’d climb out of their cars, raise their eyes to the porch, start up the flagstone walk while Mr. and Mrs. Brill stood waiting on the porch steps to welcome them. Oh, and by the way, those steps should be wooden. It was wrong to have anything else.

Commentary

In the more than fifty years she’s been writing, Tyler has authored twenty novels, has been nominated for a whole slew of awards and won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons in 1988.  A quick skim of the internet shows that she is beloved by the critics, vying for a place as one of the great American wordsmiths of the 20th Century.  In his review of the novel for the Washington Post, Ron Charles called Tyler “among the best chroniclers of family life this country has ever produced.”  And you only have to read a single page of A Spool of Blue Thread to see Tyler’s writing chops on display, whether it’s her sharp eye for comedy or capturing the true essence of an emotion, without a reliance on sentiment or melodrama.

Which is why I’m surprised that I never truly engaged with the novel.

I should be honest here and point out that I’ve had a previous bad experience with Anne Tyler’s work.  About twenty-five years ago my Year Ten (or Eleven) English class was tasked to read arguably her most famous novel, Dinner At the Homesick Restaurant.  While my memories of the book are vague and insubstantial, I do recollect (a) not finishing the novel and (b) finding something annoying about her characters.  From that point on I never felt compelled to check out the rest of Tyler’s back catalogue.  However, when I saw that Tyler had been nominated for the Booker (or for that matter the Bailey’s Prize earlier this year) I didn’t gnash or grind my teeth in anger.  Rather I found the idea of reuniting with Anne Tyler’s work to be genuinely exciting.  What my teenage self dismissed as annoying and dull might resonate with the adult me.

Yeah, not so much.

It’s not that A Spool of Blue Thread is terrible.  As I say above, Tyler is a fantastic writer and the very words she chooses, and the mood she creates, is enough to pull you through the narrative.  But I never felt particularly engaged with the plight of the Whitshank family.  They’re not dull, it’s just that they’re not memorable either.  To be fair Tyler warns the reader at the outset, telling us twice in the opening chapter that there was nothing remarkable about the Whitshanks.  And she’s true to her word.

The book opens with Red and Abby Whitshank receiving a late night phone call from their black sheep son Denny who announces that he’s gay and then ends the call.  Abby is angry with Red for hanging up on their son while Red explains that he didn’t hang up at all, that all he could get out was a “what the hell” before Denny slammed the phone down.  This opening scene not only typifies Red and Abby’s chalk and cheese marriage, but also highlights who they are as characters.  Abby is the neurotic mother who needs to be in everyone’s business but also can’t cope if anyone is upset.  Red clearly loves his wife and his kids, but his focus is more on the upkeep of his house and his construction business.  They’re both very independent and stubborn, unwilling to accept any sort of change.  As the novel progresses, these broad character strokes are reinforced as Abby and Red increasingly become caricatures, cartoonish even.  In particular, Red’s unwillingness to wear hearing aids is played for laughs as he regularly mishears what people are saying.  It’s an overplayed, clichéd and tasteless gag.

The same issues also affect the Whitshanks’s four children.  Denny, the black sheep, and one of the main focuses of the novel (it turns out he’s not gay), never develops beyond his own selfishness and frustrated failure to make something of himself.  Denny’s two sisters, Jeannie and Amanda barely have characters at all.  Jeannie is the practical one married to the hardworking husband (name of Hugh).  Amanda’s entire existence seems tethered to her selfish husband (also named Hugh) who’s constantly jumping from one pipe dream to the next.

Of the four kids, the only one to have any sort of arc is Stem (actual name Douglas).  We find out early on that Stem was adopted by the Whitshanks after his father, who worked for Red, died (there’s no sign of the mother).  Stem grows up to be very smart and conscientious, marrying the beautiful Nora – who literally floats in an out of scenes she’s so angelic – and is poised to take over his adopted father’s business which annoys Denny no end.  Both a confrontation with Denny later in the novel and a revelation as to the identity of Stem’s mother, gives his character a certain amount of backbone that wasn’t present earlier.  But he really is the only character with any noticeable character arc.

A Spool of Blue Thread becomes a more interesting novel when, in the last third, we leave the Whitshank family in the modern day and transition to the past into the families own history.  Specifically we experience the day when Abby first fell in love with Red – an event referred to regularly in the novel – followed by a section detailing the marriage between Junior (Red’s father) and his wife Linnie Mae who is half his age.  Both these glimpses into the Whitshank’s origin story are sweet without being twee and mostly importantly so very human and genuine.  I couldn’t help but think that divorced from the main text they would both make wonderful, standalone short stories.  But what I really like is how Junior, an almost mythic figure for most of the novel, is shown to be an ordinary, obsessed and at times spiteful man who is put in his place by a woman who he believes he doesn’t love, but who he can’t  bear to be without.  There’s more nuance and intelligence and character depth in both these historical flashbacks then in the rest of the book.

For those more familiar with Tyler’s work, the Whitshanks and their experiences can be viewed as part of the large tapestry of family life that Tyler has chronicled for five decades.  But as someone who hasn’t read Tyler for twenty-five years, the Whitshank’s story was fine enough while I was reading it but eminently forgettable once I’d finished.