For Anne Tyler fans, every new novel from her pen is a gift – especially since she declared three or four books ago that she would write no more.
This latest novel, her 25th, is utterly enjoyable. It is set over the three days of a wedding: the day of beauty (that’s the day before, when you get your hair done and so on), the big day and then the day after. What better device than a wedding for exploring family relationships and tensions.
The story is told in the first person by Gail, who is the mother of the bride and who, in chapter one, is sacked from her job as an assistant principal after decades, because her “people skills” are not the best. It’s not that easy to sack a teacher in Ireland, God knows, but weird things happen in the US.
Gail is a mathematician – a bit of a cliche here, perhaps, but she’s a great character. Her ex-husband, awfully nice guy Max, lands in on her to stay over the nights of the wedding, with a rescue cat, Celine – also a strong character.
For girls of my generation, especially working class girls, lack of confidence was touted as a positive
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There are a few small dramatic twists and turns, some surprising, some predictable. What could possibly wreck a wedding? No marks for guessing.
It all ends well enough.
So it’s a fairy-tale for grown-ups. An absorbing story about the kind of key family gathering almost everyone experiences, at which people can be pressed into revealing their darker sides – rivalries and anxieties surface like flotsam on the storm of champagne (not that anyone drinks much, in Tyler-land).
What all her characters have in common is they are essentially kind, forgiving and friendly – even the jealous sister and the logical mother who will not buy a new frock, even for her only daughter’s wedding.
What an antidote it is to the ugly US we are being exposed to right now. Tyler’s characters in almost all her novels are good people. Yes, this is a Baltimore fairy-tale, but the characters are so alive on the page that I find myself wondering which way they voted.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a writer and critic
