All of them linked by blood but communication is not their strong suit. Their adult kids are all living their own lives but in a detached, “from afar” way. Paint again, in another house, away from her husband, for days on end. Mercy and Robin’s marriage is strained by Mercy’s desire to paint again. Their first and last one in the summer of ’59. They expand, and evolve but not always in good ways. And, he was surprisingly the one who shone through with hope for the future.Families. The idea that family patterns can repeat is joyfully at odds with David who as an old man, a grandpa himself, gives rise to hope that he has out of them all, created a family whom he loves and is deeply connected to. The reader never really gets close enough to anyone other than Mercy yet we still don’t understand her – I didn’t anyway. While there is no plot, it is a pure character study yet the characters weren’t particularly interesting enough to spend time with and Tyler doesn’t allow us to anyway.

They are more a set of individuals living in their own worlds than a cohesive family unit and I wondered what was the point of it all. Alice helicopters over her sister, Lily, sitting in judgement about her behaviour while David their brother is so remote that he may as well have been on another planet. There’s a sadness throughout as Robin tries valiantly to hold onto a non-existent marriage too weak to do anything about it. But that is how the family operates – nonconfrontational. No-one confronts Mercy and the family just seems to know she’s left despite the appearances. Robin is left bewildered, isolated, alone and sad. Mercy was self-absorbed in her need for peace and quite as she slowly moved away from Robin to live in a loft above a garage, ostensibly to paint. The novel skips time after the holiday, spanning such a lot of time that I failed to truly engage with any of the characters. The parents fail to see anything wrong with letting Lily, only fifteen, go out with a twenty-one-year-old man and Alice worries for her younger sister. Alice picks up where her mother has left off by being the cook and carer of the younger two. Mercy is also an artist and there are no prizes for her style of mothering, as it is at best basic. The novel provides snippets of their lives until 2020 and this is one of the rare novels, I’ve read which talks about living with the pandemic, familiar to so many of us.

They manage to go away on their one and only holiday in 1957 with the three children. Mercy and Robin marry in 1940 and while Robin works long hours in the father’s plumbing business, Mercy raises the couples three children, Alice, Lily and David. It’s been a very long time since I read one of Anne Tylers books and writing about family is one of the things she does best.

Reviews of french braid by anne tyler