Anne Tyler has joined my growing group of septuagenarians
and her latest novel A Spool of Blue
Thread seems to profoundly reflect her initiation. We now deal with the travails of aging in its
broadest sense, the decline of our own physicality, our illnesses, deaths of friends
and loved ones, and anxiety about the passage of time as we near the end of the
hour glass. For many of us, there are
our adult children, and our grandchildren (not in my case) to worry about, in a
changing world that bears no resemblance to the one we grew up in. Essentially, this is what Anne Tyler speaks
to in A Spool of Blue Thread, a
metaphor that ties together four generations of the Whitshank family, which
Tyler describes as being such a recent
family that they were short on family
history. They didn’t have that many stories to choose from. They had to make the most of what they could
get.
I loved this novel, for personal reasons as well as
admiring the Tyler’s writing skills. She
is one of America’s best living writers. In my praise that follows I’ve tried
to avoid “spoilers” but as one friend pointed out when I shared this before
posting (she had read the novel as well), I reveal “critical piece[s] of the
evolution of the family’s story and relationships” – ones that she would prefer
to discover when reading the novel. I
could argue this point, but I’m issuing a “spoiler alert” just in case any
reader of this entry doesn’t want to know too much about the book before
reading it.
This is a family history told in typical “Tyleresque,”
and set mostly in the “Tylertown” of Baltimore.
The women are mostly stalwartly idiosyncratic homebodies. The men are mostly craftsmen, homebuilders. At
the top of the Whitshank family tree there is the grandfather, Junior, and his
wife, Linnie Mae. We learn that she had basically
forced herself upon him, first as a 13 year old and five years later, after
Junior moved to a boarding house in Baltimore (and completely forgot Linnie
Mae, his own family, the feeling mutual, hence being short on family history)
Linnie Mae just turned up, suitcase in hand, to move in with him, although they
had no contact during those five years: She was the bane of his existence. She was a millstone around his neck. That night back in ’31 when he went to
collect her from the train station and found her waiting out front – her
unevenly hemmed gray coat too skimpy for the Baltimore winters, her floppy
wide-brimmed felt hat so outdated that even Junior could tell – he’d had the
incongruous thought that she was like mold on lumber. You think you’ve scrubbed it off but one day
you see it’s crept back again. So,
indeed, she did creep back into his life but he finally acknowledges that his
ultimate success in the building business was in part due to her people
skills. (Junior is a craftsman, a
perfectionist, but not very good with the customers.) He builds a home for a Mr. and Mrs. Brill,
but: This was the house of his life,
after all (the way a different type of man would have a love of his
life), and against any sort of logic he clung to the conviction that he would
someday be living here.
And indeed in due course they did, bringing up their two
children, daughter Merrick and son Redcliffe, in that home. “Red” follows in his father’s footsteps with
the business, marrying Abby (the main character in the novel) and they have
four children, Amanda (who had a bossy
streak), Jeannie (tomboyish when young), Denny (whose story becomes the
beginning and end of the novel) and Stem (who was adopted when Denny was
four). Stem is called “Douglas” by his
wife, Nora, later on in the novel. Both
Amanda and Jeannie ultimately marry men with the same name, Hugh, so…their husbands were referred to as
‘Amanda’s Hugh’ and ‘Jeannie’s Hugh’, just another “family quirk.” Naturally, Red and Abby ultimately move into
the house Junior built, the bedrock for the Whitshank chronicles.
The opening chapter reads almost like a self-contained
short story – about the black sheep of the family, Denny. Personality is established at an early age,
and this incident takes place when he was 9 or 10: One time in the grocery store, when Denny was in a funk for some
reason, "Good Vibrations" started playing over the loud- speaker. It
was Abby's theme song, the one she always said she wanted for her funeral
procession, and she began dancing to it. She dipped and sashayed and
dum-da-da-dummed around Denny as if he were a maypole, but he just stalked on
down the soup aisle with his eyes fixed straight ahead and his fists jammed
into his jacket pockets. Made her look like a fool, she told Red when she got
home. (She was trying to laugh it off.) He never even glanced at her! She might
have been some crazy lady! And this was when he was nine or ten, nowhere near
that age yet when boys find their mothers embarrassing. But he had found Abby
embarrassing from earliest childhood, evidently. He acted as if he'd been
assigned the wrong mother, she said, and she just didn't measure up.
As a young adult, Denny comes and goes, disappears for
large amounts of time and then suddenly shows up. And
whenever he did come home, he was a stranger. Naturally, parents try to
“figure out” their troubled offspring:
‘It’s because I
didn’t shield him properly.’ Abby guessed.
‘Shield him from
what?’ Red asked.
‘Oh…never mind.’
‘Not from me,’
Red told her.
‘If you say so.’
‘I’m not taking the
rap for this, Abby.’
‘Fine.’
At such moments,
they hated each other.
Doesn’t that have the ring of truth, universally applied
to many families? I’ve heard that
conversation time and time again between my own parents.
Denny is shipped off to a small private college, but that
didn’t change his nature. He was still
the Whitshank’s mystery child. He
bounced around from here to there, occasionally keeping in touch by phone,
Tyler describing it with her typical humorous slant: He had this way of talking on the phone that was so intense and animated;
his parents could start to believe that he felt some urgent need for
connection. For weeks at a time he might call every Sunday until they grew to
expect it, almost depend on it, but then he'd fall silent for months and they
had no means of reaching him. It seemed perverse that someone so mobile did not
own a mobile phone. By now Abby had signed them up for caller ID, but what use
was that? Denny was OUT OF AREA. He was UNKNOWN CALLER. There should have been
a special display for him: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.
Denny suddenly marries.
The Whitshank family is invited to the wedding in NYC. The
preacher was a bike messenger with a license from the Universal Life Church. Denny and his wife Carla have a baby, Susan,
with whom at one stretch Denny regularly takes (without Carla) to visit his
parents. Suddenly, no word again, and it
goes on for three years and after 9/11 Abby can take it no longer, afraid for
her son and their granddaughter and they finally trace him. After several failed attempts to contact him,
they ask his older sister Amanda to call.
Abby and Red stand by the phone as the call is placed. Denny answers. Although the Whitshank’s couldn’t hear what
Denny said after Amanda identified herself, they could imagine by what Amanda
continued to say: Someday you’re
going to be a middle-aged man thinking back on your life, and you'll start
wondering what your family's been up to. So you'll hop on a train and come
down, and when you get to Baltimore it will be this peaceful summer afternoon
and these dusty rays of sunshine will be slanting through the skylight in Penn
Station. You'll walk on through and out to the street, where nobody is waiting
for you, but that's okay; they didn't know you were coming. Still, it feels
kind of odd standing there all alone, with the other passengers hugging people
and climbing into cars and driving away. You go to the taxi lane and you give
the address to a cabbie. You ride through the city looking at all the familiar
sights-the row houses, the Bradford pear trees, the women sitting out on their
stoops watching their children play. Then the taxi turns onto Bouton Road and
right away you get a strange feeling. There are little signs of neglect at our
house that Dad would never put up with: blistered paint and gap-toothed
shutters. Mismatched mortar patching the walk, rubber treads nailed to the
porch steps-all these Harry Homeowner fixes Dad has always railed against. You
take hold of the front-door handle and you give it that special pull toward you
that it needs before you can push down the thumb latch, but it's locked. You
ring the doorbell, but it's broken. You call, 'Mom? Dad?' No one answers. You
call, 'Hello?' No one comes running; no one flings open the door and says,
'It's you! It's so good to see you! Why didn't you let us know? We'd have met
you at the station! Are you tired? Are you hungry? Come in!' You stand there a
while, but you can't think what to do next. You turn and look back toward the
street, and you wonder about the rest of the family. 'Maybe Jeannie,' you say.
'Or Amanda.' But you know something, Denny? Don't count on me to take you in,
because I'm angry. I'm angry at you for leading us on such a song and dance all
these years, not just these last few years but all the years, skipping all
those holidays and staying away from the beach trips and missing Mom and Dad's
thirtieth anniversary and their thirty-fifth and Jeannie's baby and not
attending my wedding that time or even sending a card or calling to wish me
well. But most of all, Denny, most
of all: I will never forgive you for consuming every last drop of our parents’
attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us.
This is a poignant piece of writing, a cautionary note
about the passage of time and the dangers of ignoring family and the ordinary
details of our lives. Abby wonders how
they settled for so little when it came to their prodigal son. She says, ‘would you have believed it? Sometimes whole
days go by when I don’t give him a thought.’
This is not natural! Red said, ‘It’s perfectly natural. Like a
mother cat when her kittens are grown.
You’re showing very good sense.’ And this is just the first chapter,
and it sets the stage for everything that follows.
Tyler though does not construct the novel
chronologically, instead moving back and forth in time. Regarding the
grandfather, Junior, in her usual good humor Tyler explains -- If it seems odd to call a patriarch ‘Junior,’
there was a logical explanation.
Junior’s true name was Jurvis Roy, shortened at some point to J.R. and
then re-expanded, accordion-like, to Junior. As noted, Junior builds the house of his
dreams for Mr. Brill, knowing full well in his heart that eventually he would be
able to buy it, which he did. He fidgets
with it for the rest of his life as a builder, head of Whitshank Construction,
then carried on by his son Red who moves his family into the house. The house stands as a bulwark in
juxtaposition to the fragility of the family.
Then another time leap to Abby who comes from another
section of Baltimore and marries Red.
Might Tyler’s description of Abby match up in some ways to her own? As a girl, she'd been a fey sprite of a
thing. She'd worn black turtlenecks in winter and peasant blouses in summer;
her hair had hung long and straight down her back while most girls clamped
their pageboys into rollers every night. She wasn't just poetic but artistic,
too, and a modern dancer, and an activist for any worthy cause that came along.
You could count on her to organize her school's Canned Goods for the Poor drive
and the Mitten Tree. Her school was Merrick's school, private and girls-only
and posh, and though Abby was only a scholarship student, she was the star
there, the leader. In college, she plaited her hair into cornrows and picketed
for civil rights. She graduated near the top of her class and became a social
worker, what a surprise, venturing into Baltimore neighborhoods that none of
her old schoolmates knew existed. Even after she married Red (whom she had
known for so long that neither of them could remember their first meeting), did
she turn ordinary? Not a chance. She insisted on natural childbirth, breast-fed
her babies in public, served her family wheat germ and home-brewed yogurt,
marched against the Vietnam War with her youngest astride her hip, sent her
children to public schools. Her house was filled with her handicrafts-macrame
plant hangers and colorful woven serapes. She took in strangers off the
streets, and some/of them stayed for weeks. There was no telling who would show
up at her dinner table.
Skipping to the very present, we learn that Abby has a
form of dementia. This begins a
progression of events and the eventual rallying of the family, even Denny. On one lovely day, with the family on the
porch Denny was recollecting to Stem (who is now running the business for aged
Red) about his earliest recollection of his grandfather ripping out the walkway
and resetting the stones, Abby comments ‘Oh,
you men, stop talking shop!....Weather like this always takes me back to the
day I fell in love with Red’…The others smiled.
They knew the story well….’It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green
afternoon’ Abby began. Which was the way she always began, exactly the same
words, every single time. On the porch, everybody relaxed. Their faces grew
smooth, and their hands loosened in their laps. It was so restful to be sitting
here with family, with the birds talking in the trees and the crosscut-sawing
of the crickets and the dog snoring at their feet and the children calling,
‘Safe! I'm safe!’
That’s as good as it gets for any writer, to be able to
conjure up such images. I read and
reread the passage again and again. Even
in my own twisted childhood there were times I felt “I’m safe.”
For some time the adult children, along with spouses and
Abby and Red’s grandchildren come and go to help their aging parents. There we learn much about the internal
sibling rivalry, the hurts, the jealousies, and how these emotions relate to
their upbringing. In particular, Stem
(Douglas) and Denny come to blows, literally.
Abby, even in her condition, comes upon certain truths
about life such as, you wake in the
morning, you’re feeling fine, but all at once you think, ‘Something’s not
right. Something’s off somewhere;
what is it?’ And then you remember that
it’s your child – whichever one is unhappy.
She is seeing a doctor about her condition but she wants
to discuss philosophical issues: ‘And
time,’ she would tell Dr. Wiss. ‘Well, you know about time. How slow it is when
you're little and how it speeds up faster and faster once you're grown. Well,
now it's just a blur. I can't keep track of it anymore! But it's like time is
sort of ... balanced. We're young for such a small fraction of our lives, and
yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we're old for years and years,
but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end, don't you
see.’ I’m sure even Einstein would
agree. It’s all relative!
To go on with more about Abby’s fate is to reveal too
much. The house of the Brills, then
Junior’s, and then Red’s stands steadfast front and center, almost like another
character in the novel, but even that eventually devolves. Everything changes over the course of time,
but the spool of blue thread runs from generation to generation to
generation. Tyler captures this in
perhaps her most ambitious novel ever, showing her abiding sympathy for her
characters, and there are many in this novel.
It fittingly ends as it begins, focused on peripatetic Denny,
who is searching for his own sense of belonging and place, as he boards a train
for New Jersey on the eve of hurricane Sandy, an interesting image to leave the
reader with towards the conclusion of this wonderful, evocative, but
essentially melancholy, novel. Tyler may
be showing her age, but clearly with no diminution of her writing skills.
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| My grandfather's Richmond Hill family home circa 1930's |
