although Tyler has devoted her life to novels, she commands all the tools of a brilliant short story writer. With exquisite subtlety, this early chapter lays down the psychological trajectories of several storylines that develop throughout French Braid. It doesn’t even matter if you believe in the sanctity of family life the sound alone brings solace. Indeed, given today’s slate of horror and chaos, the rich melody of French Braid offers the comfort of a beloved hymn. There are times when such familiarity might feel tiresome. The insular Baltimore family, the quirky occupations, the special foods - they all move across these pages as predictably as the phases of the moon. 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. For Mercy Garrett, that simply isn’t the case. 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.
Tyler takes aim at a sentimental trope deeply embedded in American culture. For all its charm, French Braid is a quietly subversive novel, tacklinging fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging. It looks squarely at the consequences of stifled female ambition - to the woman herself, and to those in her orbit. The novel is imbued with an old-school feminism of a kind currently unfashionable.
French Braid is the opposite of reassuring. It is a moving meditation on the passage of time. 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. 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. Five decades into her career, one gets the sense that Tyler is no longer quite so interested in the details. The younger Garretts are drawn haphazardly, or not at all. There are simply too many years to cover, too many children and grandchildren to keep track of. 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.
For Tyler fans, this is familiar territory: the quotidian frictions and rewards of family life in white, middle-class Baltimore.
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