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Anne Tyler, Close-Up Artist, Zooms Out for a Novel of Family Rifts

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By Jennifer Haigh

• Published March 20, 2022 Updated March 21, 2022

FRENCH BRAID By Anne Tyler

In the opening pages of “French Braid,” a Baltimore college student spots a familiar-looking man in a train station. She suspects — but isn’t sure — that he is her first cousin Nicholas. Her uncertainty shocks her traveling companion — the boyfriend whose own close-knit family she has just met.

The roots of this familial distance are the central concern of “French Braid,” the 24th novel by the beloved Baltimore novelist Anne Tyler. Spanning 60 years and multiple generations, it offers a diffuse, affectionate portrait of the Garretts, a loving but aloof family in which nearly everything is left unsaid.

Our first glimpse of the Garrett clan comes in 1959, as the cousins’ grandparents, Robin and Mercy, take a rare family vacation with their children. Tyler proceeds to check in on them once every decade or so, always at some moment of transition. What emerges is a kind of forensic examination of Garrett family relations, a look at how their elliptical style of interaction came to be.

Tyler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, is at heart a 20th-century realist, a younger contemporary of John Updike , Richard Yates and Alice Munro . Like them, she is interested in the tension between freedom and intimacy, personal fulfillment and the demands of family life. Mercy Garrett is a frustrated artist who, after a year and a half of art school in Baltimore, shelved her dream of studying in Paris, married decent, reliable Robin and raised three children. Only after her youngest leaves for college do her aspirations resurface. Mercy rents a painting studio a few blocks away and quietly “leaves” Robin by gradually moving her possessions there. It’s a remarkable development, not least because it takes the rest of the family quite a while to catch on.

In fact, Mercy never admits that she and Robin have separated, not even to their children. Her new independence is too fragile. When her daughter confesses that her own marriage is on the rocks, Mercy panics: “She was ashamed to admit that her main concern was how to dissuade Lily from moving into the studio.” Mercy manages to dodge that bullet, only to get stuck taking care of her landlord’s cat. When he asks her to keep the cat permanently, she can’t bring herself to say no. She simply dumps it at an animal shelter when the landlord leaves town.

Mercy’s furtiveness — call it an extreme aversion to confrontation — is echoed across the generations. When her son, David, suddenly marries a colleague at the school where he teaches, he tells his family after the fact. His sister Lily conceals her third marriage from her own children. Eddie, a Garrett grandson, never gets around to telling the family he is gay.

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Culture | Books

French Braid by Anne Tyler review: a quietly radical story

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I’ve been Anne Tyler -ed. After finishing French Braid, the 24 th 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.

The novel introduces us to the Garretts, an unremarkable family from Baltimore. We begin in 2010, when granddaughter Serena spots her cousin in a train station; her boyfriend is bemused at the fact she’s hesitant about saying hello to him. “Oh, what makes a family not work?” she wonders. The question is like a prayer that hangs over the book. Nothing deeply traumatic happens in this family –in fact, it’s the nothingness that conjures a kind of unshiftable cloud of pain and loss. The Garretts are a family that don’t really know each other, nor what to say to one another.

The action spins back to 1959, and we meet Robin and Mercy Garrett. He has taken over the running of a hardware shop that ran in Mercy’s family; she has parked her painterly ambitions in order to be a housewife and a mother. They are embarking on their first proper holiday with their three children, heading for Deep Creek Lake and stoically determined to enjoy themselves. While there, it’s as though they are individuals unconnected with one another: Mercy wants to get on with her watercolours, while Robin wades into the lake and has blokey chats with a new friend he’s made. Their eldest, Alice, takes charge of the cooking; Lily, the middle child, spends most of it off necking with a boy called Trent; and young David, age seven, cautiously avoids getting into the water until his dad forces him into it.

We jump ahead in time with each chapter, observing how the family dynamic has shaped each of them. Alice becomes prissy and domineering and Lily is flaky and unmoored, while David, never losing the sense that his dad dislikes him, keeps his family at arm’s length. Tyler’s set-pieces – here largely conceived as awkward family get-togethers – seem undramatic, but her rhythms are masterly. In one, David brings home his new partner Greta and her young daughter; he doesn’t explain that they are in a relationship, and, like rabbits trapped in headlights, no one asks. Conversations start then short circuit, sputter back into life and then get stuck again.

Perhaps most extraordinary is when Mercy moves out of the family home, one laundry bag at a time, and eventually starts living full-time in her studio and trying to make a living as a painter. It would upset Robin if she left him, so she never says that she has – and no one in the family ever admits it either. 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. Early on, Serena becomes irritated and defensive after meeting her new boyfriend’s welcoming family. “The trouble with wide-open families was, there was something very narrow about their attitude to not-open families,” she thinks. It’s as thought the Garretts can sense that being a family doesn’t come quite naturally to them, and end up crushed by the expectation of it as a concept.

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. Sentences appear that seem simple and then suddenly break your heart, such as Mercy’s reflection on her now-grown family: “It all happened so fast, she thought, even though it had seemed endless at the time.” Like I said... I’ve been Anne Tyler-ed.

French Tyler by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus, £16.99)

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

FRENCH BRAID

by Anne Tyler ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 22, 2022

More lovely work from Tyler, still vital and creative at 80.

In her 24th novel, 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. Robin and Mercy Garrett and their three children seem oddly distanced from each other when we meet them during a 1959 summer vacation. Robin talks a lot about what everything costs, and Mercy is frequently absent painting the local landscape. Fifteen-year-old Lily is also not around much; deprived of her Baltimore boyfriend, she’s taken up with an older boy who bossy, judgmental older sister Alice is pleased to opine is only using her. Seven-year-old David rejects Robin’s attempts to get him in the water in favor of inventing elaborate storylines for the plastic GIs he’s recast as veterinarians. As usual, Tyler deftly sets the scene and broadly outlines characters who will change and deepen over time as the Garretts traverse 60 years; individual chapters offer the perspective of each parent and sibling (plus three members of the third generation). We need to get inside their heads, because the Garretts seldom discuss what’s really on their minds, the primary example being the fact that once David goes to college, Mercy gets a studio and eventually stops living with Robin altogether. All the children know, but since she appears for family gatherings—including a weird but moving surprise 50th anniversary party Robin throws—no one ever mentions it. Tyler gives the final word to David, who, like his mother, has maintained tenuous family ties while deliberately keeping his distance. Families are like the French braids that left their daughter’s hair in waves even after she undid them, he tells his wife: “You’re never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever.” It’s a characteristically homely, resonant metaphor from a writer who understands that the domestic world can contain the universe.

Pub Date: March 22, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-32109-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Anne Tyler

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

PERSPECTIVES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

BY ANY OTHER NAME

by Jodi Picoult ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 20, 2024

A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.

Who was Shakespeare?

Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name , “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.

Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024

ISBN: 9780593497210

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

More by Jodi Picoult

by Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan

by Jodi Picoult

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French Braid: A Novel

• By Anne Tyler
• Reviewed by Jennifer Bort Yacovissi
• April 4, 2022

The literary patron saint of Baltimore serves up her signature affectionate take on family dysfunction.

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.

French Braid is Tyler’s 24th novel, and that body of work forms a unified whole of style, place, and character. It is long since readers have understood her universe and eagerly return to it with each new release. Tyler offers literary comfort food without apology; as she noted in a 2015 interview, a reader looks to Philip Roth for “piss and vinegar” and to her for “milk and cookies.”

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.

It strikes me that Tyler and Ann Patchett use similar approaches to their work. Patchett’s usual leaping-off point takes a group of strangers and throws them together into an unusual situation to see what happens. Tyler takes a family in situ and throws its members at one another to reveal that they are indeed strangers, too — the question is whether any of them will come to recognize the others as individuals and not simply as caricatures permanently stamped with their assigned roles within the domestic hierarchy.

The idea of family as a collection of strangers locked in predetermined roles is front and center in French Braid , with the lines marked from the outset. We’re introduced to the Garretts obliquely, when one of the cousins, Serena, thinks she recognizes another cousin, Nicholas, standing nearby in Philadelphia’s Penn Station. Serena’s boyfriend, James, finds it amusingly odd that she’s not sure and inexplicable that members of a relatively small family don’t seem to know each other.

When Serena and Nicholas finally chat, Nicholas can’t remember which of his two aunts, Alice or Lily, is Serena’s mother, and asks, “I have a cousin named Candle?” James teases Serena that she describes the geographical distance separating the three Garrett siblings — Alice in Baltimore County, Lily in Baltimore City, and David in Philly — as vast, unbridgeable spaces.

The story rolls on to illuminate that it’s not the geography that is unbridgeable.

It has been observed that the passage of time provides the plot of Anne Tyler novels; here, it is a combination of passing time and successive points of view. From Serena’s chance meeting with Nicholas in 2010, the author whisks us back to 1959, the year of the lone Garrett family vacation.

Robin Garrett is proprietor of his late father-in-law’s plumbing-supply company and has never been able to step away from the business long enough to take wife Mercy and their three children on a vacation. It’s only now that Alice is 17 and Lily 15 that Mercy is finally able to prevail on him to spend a week at Maryland’s Deep Creek Lake. David, at 7, is the only one in the target demographic of those likely to be excited at the prospect.

In this foundational chapter, eldest child Alice is our guide into the roots of the Garretts’ dysfunction — quotidian, familiar dysfunction with a lowercase “d,” arising at least partly from all the things we cannot, will not, say to each other. Mercy is vague in her commitment to fulfilling her maternal duties, preferring to spend time sketching and painting; Alice long ago stepped into the breach:

“Alice often liked to imagine that a book was being written about her life. A narrator with an authoritative male voice was describing her every act. ‘Alice sighed’ was a frequent observation.”

When, at the lake, Lily immediately falls in with a much older boy with a car and a rich family, Alice is desperate for her parents to inhabit their given roles as gatekeepers. Instead, Robin’s acquaintance with another father awakens his latent paternal instinct to bully a reluctant David into proving his 7-year-old manliness, in this case by getting into the water.

Ah, the fond, lifelong memories formed on family vacations!

It’s good that we spend time with Alice early, when we can sympathize with her circumstance, before she hardens into a judgmental scold and gossip. Her view of her family — Lily as petulant and irresponsible, Mercy as cheerfully, irritatingly inattentive — comes to color ours, so that we join in the judgment.

We pick up again in 1970: With David off to college, Mercy enacts her plan to move gradually into her rented art studio without ever admitting to Robin that she’s leaving — that she’s left — even after she stops coming back to the house to fix his breakfast or dinner.

Mercy’s gambit is both funny and heartbreaking; we never saw her stealthy, steely resolve coming, but neither did Robin, who is left blindsided and uncomprehending, certain he had been doing all that was expected of him.

Tyler often writes about the corrosive effects of family secrets. The lovely twist in French Braid is that there are none — merely a kindhearted, collaborative ignoring of certain truths. Robin is able to maintain his dignity, sure that none of the children realize Mercy has left, and they allow him his fiction.

In one of the most touching episodes later in the novel, the now elderly Lily accidentally meets her nephew Eddie’s live-in boyfriend, Claude, whom Eddie is desperate to keep hidden. When Claude tells him, “Oh, babe. She knows…She knew all along,” Eddie finally realizes his entire family has always known he is gay without ever offering comment or critique.

French Braid brings us all the way into the pandemic and eventually into David’s point of view. Through the years, he has presented a frustrating mystery to his parents and sisters as to why he holds himself at such a remove from the rest of the Garretts.

The women share a quiet, collective blaming of David’s older wife, Greta, whom they see as cold and overly direct, while Robin is certain it’s because he made David work “the summer of the plumber” before he started college. They cast about for specific reasons, but it’s a misguided search.

These are simply the vicissitudes of family; they may think David is absent, but for him, his family is ever-present. And as we watch David and Greta host their son and grandson through a covid summer, we realize how fully, beautifully functional this family has become.

Jennifer Bort Yacovissi’s debut novel, Up the Hill to Home , tells the story of four generations of a family in Washington, DC, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. Her short fiction has appeared in Gargoyle and Pen-in-Hand. Jenny reviews regularly for the Independent and serves on its board of directors as president. She has served as chair or program director of the Washington Writers Conference since 2017, and for several recent years was president of the Annapolis chapter of the Maryland Writers’ Association. Stop by Jenny’s website for a collection of her reviews and columns, and follow her on Twitter at @jbyacovissi.

Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Or through Bookshop.org

Book Review in Fiction More

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

Edited by john joseph adams and charles yu.

Twenty clever tales for fans of the fantastical.

• Science Fiction ,

Theresa Smith Writes

Delighting in all things bookish, book review: french braid by anne tyler, about the book:.

The major new novel from the beloved prize-winning author — a brilliantly perceptive, painfully true, and funny journey deep into one family’s foibles, from the 1950s right up to the changed world of today.

When the kids are grown and Mercy Garrett gradually moves herself out of the family home, everyone is determined not to notice.

Over at her studio, she wants space and silence. She won’t allow any family clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond.

Yet it is a clutter of untidy moments that forms the Garretts’ family life over the decades, whether that’s a painstaking Easter lunch or giving a child a ride, a fateful train journey or an unexpected homecoming.

And it all begins in 1959, with a family holiday to a cabin by a lake. It’s the only one the Garretts will ever take, but its effects will ripple through the generations.

Published by Penguin Random House Australia – Chatto & Windus

Released 29 th March 2022

My Thoughts:

Anne Tyler. What is there to even say? There is truly no other author out there like her. I always feel a bit useless writing a review on an Anne Tyler novel, to be honest, because I always love them, and the nature of her writing gives little room for commentary. As with all her previous novels, French Braid has no plot to speak of, but is instead a deep character study of the members of the Garrett family through the generations. This is of course what I love most about Anne Tyler – that she can pull us into the everyday and hold us so entirely captivated for the duration. Because as with all her families, there is much to recognise within, as well as much to contemplate and think over.

‘Oh, the lengths this family would go to so as not to spoil the picture of how things were supposed to be!’

The title of this novel bears a great deal of significance and is explained right before it ends. I don’t think it’s a spoiler if I elaborate on it here, and really, it explains so much about the novel and will give you an insight into what it’s about. One of the characters likens family to the unravelling of a French braid. How the braid leaves the hair rippled for a long time after. He points out that this is similar to how families work, tightly woven for a period and then once unravelled, the ripples remain, crimped in forever. I absolutely love that. I come from a big family, a vast number of cousins, some of which I am in contact with, none of which I actually ever see, due to distance mostly. But the ripples are still there, and we are still crimped together by our shared experiences, even if we probably do all view them differently from each other.

If you’re a fan of Anne Tyler, this novel will not disappoint. If you’ve never read her before (people like this exist?) then consider this your starting place. She is, as ever, stunning, and delivers another brilliant read.

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

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18 thoughts on “ book review: french braid by anne tyler ”.

We’ll agree to disagree on Anne Tyler 🙂 I totally understand why people love her work, but I find her style a little bland (not sure why, I can’t put my finger on it). I have picked up her books here and there over the years and although I wouldn’t have bothered with this one, I was interested to note that the cover is in quite a different style to her last few books. New publicist seeking a new audience?

Like Liked by 1 person

The Australian edition (pictured here) is in the same style to her others that I have on my shelf (white border with photograph) but the cover they had on Goodreads was really different – is that the one you mean? Despite loving her work so much, I’ll acknowledge that it would definitely not be for everyone. Bland is probably the right word, you’ve really got to like that sort of thing. There are people I know who I just wouldn’t press an Anne Tyler onto. But for me, her novels are perfection.

I actually meant the cover you have shown – it seems stronger than the soft-toned art/ photos that I think of when I think of Tyler – clearly I haven’t noticed any of her books in the last few years!

I had another look after your comment. They seem to have made the photo smaller so there’s more white and by setting the title and author onto the white, instead of directly onto the photo like the others, it does come off bolder. Same but different principle. I still recognised it as a classic Anne Tyler cover, but it is a bit altered.

Yes me too, Kate. I had to check at Goodreads to see which book I’d read which had left me with the same impression, it was The Accidental Tourist. I have nothing bad to say about it, just that I read it back in 2003 and it obviously didn’t make an impression that made me look for more. But hey, reading tastes are as different as people are, and I say that’s a good thing:)

Many people have told me that The Accidental Tourist was the first and only Tyler they read and that it made them never want to read her again. For me, I think coming to Anne Tyler in my 40s has made for a more rewarding read. I can’t imagine I would have liked her work as much 20 years ago, bland, as Kate mentioned, would have definitely been a factor. But where I am now, it’s more comfort than bland. But there are layers to her work, depths that really get you when you least expect it. But you are right, different tastes makes for more robust book talk!

Goodness, I used to be such a huge Anne Tyler fan and have many of her earlier works but until I saw your review, I had no idea how many of her books I’ve missed reading. This has now prompted me to revisit her latest releases starting with this one first I think.

She’s still steadily releasing. Not a bad idea, start here and work backwards!

Might have to.

*happy sigh* Can’t wait! xx

You’ll love it! x

I’m a fan too Theresa and just started reading this last night. I totally get her ‘bland’ families, except for me I understand all too well their angst and torment and don’t find it bland at all. She has captured the nuance of these cold families that don’t communicate well, perfectly. It’s not that they’re unloving, they just don’t know how to show it or talk about it, so all these painful little moments keep them apart and hinder their relationships. Her stories usually leave me feeling rather raw, but in a cathartic way.

Yes!!! To everything here you have said. That is EXACTLY how I feel about them and also how they make me feel.

I have mixed feelings about this one. The author shines an intelligent light on families, which offers food for thought. But I was thrown by the pace of the book. I felt it sagged a bit in the middle. I wasn’t sure where it was going, nor what story it was trying to tell. And then it started jumping forward by huge chunks of time, leaving me a bit breathless. I’m a little bewildered. I suspect if I reread it, it would make more sense, but too many other things to read!

Yes, I almost never reread. For me, I thought it was just about the dynamics over time, no actual story, just purely about the relationships.

You’re right, it is about the relationships. But for some funny reason I expected a bit more plot, and having misled myself, I struggled to enjoy the story. So the flaw was not in the story, but in the reader.

She is unique in not having much plot to her novels.

Pingback: Top 15 Books of my 2022 Reading Year | Theresa Smith Writes

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Book Summary and Reviews of French Braid by Anne Tyler

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French Braid

by Anne Tyler

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About this book

Book summary.

From the beloved best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author - a funny, joyful, brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one Baltimore family's foibles, from a boyfriend with a red Chevy in the 1950s up to a longed-for reunion with a grandchild in our pandemic present.

The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation. Full of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close—yet how unknowable—every family is to itself. First published March 2022. Paperback reprint Feb 2023

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Reader reviews.

"Anne Tyler's French Braid is entirely familiar, and that's just perfect... Late in the novel, David's wife reminds him: "This is what families do for each other — hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses." "And little cruelties," David adds. Who captures that poignant paradox so well as Anne Tyler, our patron saint of the unremarked outlandishness of ordinary life?" - Ron Charles, The Washington Post " 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...For all its charm, it is a quietly subversive novel, tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging." - Jennifer Haigh, New York Times "[A]ny 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." - Anthony Cummins, The Guardian "Lushly imagined, psychologically intricate, virtually inhalable...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 feels fresh and incisive, and this charming family tale will be honey for her fans." - Booklist (starred review) "Tyler returns with a dry and well-crafted look at a family that inexplicably comes apart over several decades...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." - Publishers Weekly "Tyler draws her characters and their interactions in such specific and revealing detail...More lovely work from Tyler, still vital and creative at 80." - Kirkus Review

Author Information

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Anne Tyler Author Biography

Photo: Diana Walker

Anne Tyler's 50 Year Writing Career

In March 2013, Anne Tyler announced the title of her upcoming novel in an interview with the BBC. She also noted that she didn't want to finish another novel - not even this one. She described the book as a "sprawling family saga," which starts with the present generation and then moves back, one generation at a time. Fortunately, she realized she was only interested in three generations. Before this revelation, she figured A Spool of Blue Thread could go on long enough that she might die before its publication! That way she wouldn't have the hassle of the editing, polishing, promoting and worrying if the book was any good or not. This sounds like the pressure of thinking up something new and original, combined with her obvious penchant for ...

... Full Biography Author Interview

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French Braid by Anne Tyler

• Publication Date: February 21, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Vintage
• ISBN-10: 0593466403
• ISBN-13: 9780593466407
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Book review: French Braid, by Anne Tyler

Near the end of this entrancing family novel comes news of another marriage. A younger member of the family is surprised that the woman, Lily, didn’t even tell her daughter she was getting married again. “Oh well,” his mother says, “this is America, remember. This country was settled by dissidents and malcontents and misfits and adventurers. Thorny people. They don’t always follow the etiquette.”

Fair enough, and 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. Here she writes about a family in which connections between its members are strained but never quite severed.

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It begins with a nice piece of misdirection, a conversation between young lovers on a train journey to Baltimore, the girl Serena’s home city. I say “misdirection” because reading this first chapter, you assume that the novel will be Serena and James’s story. But it isn’t. It’s about Serena’s family, the Garretts, and their connectionns are frayed and loose.

We go back then to 1959 and the only family vacation the Garretts, Robin and Mercy, and their children Alice, Lily and little David, ever took together. Alice was then 17 and this rather drab and unrewarding week in a lakeside cabin is mostly seen through her eyes. Robin, who owns a plumbing materials store, spends time in the lake. To his disappointment his little son, David, is frightened of the water, and will grow up sure his father didn’t like him. Mercy goes sketching in the woods. Fifteen year-old Lily takes up with an unsuitable boy and expects a proposal of marriage by the end of the week. Alice, a reflective girl, keeps house and keeps watch too over her sister and little brother. The last meal of the week is admirably done. Lily, heart-broken, though her heart will soon be repaired, keeps to her room. When Robin angrily says she will be falling for a new boy before the week is out, the following paragraph reads:

“‘She says nobody understands her and she wants to die,’ Mercy told him. Then she asked, ’Can I have the rest of your salad?’”

This, by the way, consists mostly of avocados which Robin has viewed with distrust, even suspicion, as if, perhaps, they were un-American.

Soon after the vacation Mercy will move out of the house and live and sleep in her studio, though she returns home to cook Robin’s breakfast and the new separate design for living is never openly acknowledged, even as the years pass and the children become middle-aged.

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, but in her case this double vision was mostly confined to her central figure or heroine. She rarely attempted to show us her male characters except as they presented themselves to the world. Tyler contrives to do this, here in the case of both Robin and David.

She has the lightest touch. This novel spans 60 years, from that Lakeside vacation when Eisenhower was in the White House and the American Dream was alive to the current pandemic. Up-to-date fictional treatments of the covid years have what the American car industry had in its prime – “built-in obsolescence” – but 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.

French Braid, by Anne Tyler, Penguin, 244pp, £16.99

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French Braid: A novel Paperback – February 21, 2023

• Print length 256 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date February 21, 2023
• Dimensions 5.15 x 0.75 x 7.99 inches
• ISBN-10 0593466403
• ISBN-13 978-0593466407
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (February 21, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593466403
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593466407
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.15 x 0.75 x 7.99 inches
• #3,234 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #3,960 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
• #9,916 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grownups, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Thread, Vinegar Girl and Clock Dance.

In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence; and in 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize.

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 41% 32% 19% 6% 3% 41%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 41% 32% 19% 6% 3% 32%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 41% 32% 19% 6% 3% 19%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 41% 32% 19% 6% 3% 6%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 41% 32% 19% 6% 3% 3%

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Customers say

Customers find the writing quality deep, relatable, and sweet. They also appreciate the insight, writing style, and ease of reading. Opinions are mixed on the tone, entertainment value, characterization, complexity, and reading experience. Some find the book entertaining, funny, and touching, while others say it's depressing and cruel.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book well-written, relatable, and sweet. They also say the story crosses generations and is rich in realizations. Customers also say that the works have heart and teach them.

"...The answer is YES.Anne Tyler is a wonderful writer , and both books demonstrate her skills...." Read more

"...Once read fully, I understood how insightful, thoughtful and thought provoking this book is...." Read more

"...crafting of the story of a family at once both utterly unique and deeply relatable ...." Read more

"Anne Tyler has done it again: created a family so real that some members are in your own family...." Read more

Customers find the writing style smooth, neat, and delightful, with surprising and recognizable characters. They also say the book is easy to read and has great dialog among interesting characters.

"...The writing, as always, is smooth and neat and tight and it's a pleasure to read. I truly couldn't find one single thing that offended me...." Read more

" Easy read . Entertaining. Each character has a distinct personality...." Read more

"...I did find this book a little bit disjointed as it jumped from character to character...." Read more

"...herself in the crafting of the story of a family at once both utterly unique and deeply relatable...." Read more

Customers find the book insightful, thoughtful, and poignant. They also appreciate the author's great job of characterization and spot-on human behavior.

"...This opening chapter is structurally and thematically necessary ...." Read more

"...Anne Tyler is a wonderful writer, and both books demonstrate her skills . But these two books have so much in common that it is truly puzzling...." Read more

"...Once read fully, I understood how insightful , thoughtful and thought provoking this book is...." Read more

"...Every character is vividly developed, and each event is richly detailed and ultimately interwoven with others that are revealed in the effectively..." Read more

Readers have mixed opinions about the book. Some find it an enjoyable read, while others find it hard to like or understand.

"...The writing, as always, is smooth and neat and tight and it's a pleasure to read . I truly couldn't find one single thing that offended me...." Read more

"...I have to say these people were hard to like , or understand, but it didn't stop me from reading the whole book." Read more

"...A good read but not very exciting." Read more

"... An enjoyable read ." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the entertainment value of the book. Some find the story entertaining, with humor and hurtfulness. They say the novel moves around in time quite adeptly, developing its characters nicely along the way. However, others say they never did enjoy the story, and the first chapter did not set the stage in a meaningful way.

"...A good read but not very exciting ." Read more

"...I would give Amateur Marriage 4-5 stars. It was an engrossing story about a large , complicated family with a difficult mother, an unbelievably..." Read more

"...This book did not hold my interest until the last third, then I did not put it down again until I finished reading it...." Read more

"...Consequently, when I went to write this review I had trouble remembering the actual story line ...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the characterization in the book. Some find the characters interesting, believable, and likable, while others find them superficial.

"The author did an excellent job of character development and I enjoyed the way she organized the book...." Read more

"...The characters aren't necessarily likable . In fact, Mercy, the main character, is downright infuriating...." Read more

"Easy read. Entertaining. Each character has a distinct personality ...." Read more

"...I did find this book a little bit disjointed as it jumped from character to character ...." Read more

Customers find the book simple, yet lovely. They say it's ordinary and nothing dramatic. However, some customers find it confusing, tedious, and trite. They also say the mundane things described in excruciating detail are hard to relate to.

"...But these two books have so much in common that it is truly puzzling . (There are literally identical phrases and descriptions in them.)..." Read more

"...They appear to be easy breezy , but the prose & the characters are always more than they seem...." Read more

"...I just thought she was selfish and hard to relate to . But I still enjoyed the book immensely. Ms Tyler’s characters are just so human...." Read more

"...No soaring prose here. Mundane things described in excruciating detail . More than once I said to myself "Will you just get on with it?"...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the tone of the book. Some find it not overdone, with not an overwhelming amount of emotion. They also mention the book is caring, with no drama or revenge. However, others find it depressing, insufferable, and cruel.

"...In fact, Mercy, the main character, is downright infuriating ...." Read more

"...There is humor and hurtfulness but no drama or revenge ...." Read more

"... Very depressing ." Read more

"...Not over done, not an overwhelming amount of emotion . Just right" Read more

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