French Braid, by Anne Tyler (2022)

The latest Anne Tyler, French Braid, takes its place in the author’s long line of compassionate portraits of ordinary people. Here the story concerns a centrifugal family: a father deeply in love with his wife but busy with the plumbing store he inherited from her father; a wife and mother more committed to her unfashionable and untalented painting than to her children, whom she loves, but at a distance; an elder daughter who takes over management of the household by default, and enjoys it; the wildly boy-crazy younger daughter scorned by her sister; and the sensitive much younger brother, who realizes, on the one family vacation away from Baltimore, that his father doesn’t love him. We see these people as they grow up, marry (the younger sister three times), and have children of their own, the cousins increasingly out of touch with one another. Tyler explores the ways in which the family members still are connected, however, and respects the complexity of all of them.

Tyler is not an experimental or innovative novelist, and we should not expect high style from her. But we need authors with her sharp eye for everyday details and her ability to portray people’s fallible understanding of themselves. There are novels that take us to unknown lands, and those that reveal our own land to us. Tyler is an expert in showing us ourselves.