Pat Conroy and My Own Reading Life

The passing of Pat Conroy is yet another loss in my reading life.  He touched a lyrical nerve in that life, and the magnetism of his dysfunctional family years brought me into his writings.  Although a southerner, he was a kindred spirit.  Even his college basketball days chronicled in his My Losing Season resonated on a personal basis. He was a point guard in college, one of my dreams when I was much younger, although unrealized.

He died of pancreatic cancer.  The worst kind I can think of, my own father having wasted away from the same. And now a dear friend of mine, after successful Whipple surgery five years ago, fighting the unrelenting return of that dreaded disease.

One by one, the writers I grew up with, Richard Yates, John Cheever, John Updike, and now Pat Conroy, passing.  There are other writers taking their place.  Literature is alive and well even in this 140 character world, thanks to luminaries such as Conroy.

In his very personal memoir, My Reading Life, the dedication cried out for being reunited with his estranged daughter: This book is dedicated to my lost daughter, Susannah Ansley Conroy.  Know this. I love you with my heart and always will.  Your return to my life would be one of the happiest moments I could imagine.

My entry on that book, written soon after I emerged from the hospital following complicated open heart surgery, also noted that dedication and expressed my hope that it might lead to reconciliation.  I wonder whether it happened, as much for her sake as her father’s.

Goodbye Pat Conroy.  You brought beautiful fiction into my world, a Phoenix rising from the ashes of a sorrowful childhood.

All That Is

Having read James Salter’s Light Years I was eager to read his last work, one that was written and published only two years before his death at the age of 90.  Why does a person nearing the end of his life take one last plunge into writing a novel after such a long absence (the previous one was written more than 30 years earlier)?  

That is immediately answered in the epigraph preceding the half title page:  “There comes a time when you / realize that everything is a dream, / and only those things preserved in writing / have any possibility of being real.”  Salter has important things to say about that “dream,” and thus this novel.

Light Years is poetic whereas All That Is is more episodic, covering the events of the entire adult life of Philip Bowman, a naval officer in WW II, Harvard educated.  He takes a circuitous route to becoming one of the leading editors in a well-known New York City literary publishing house, one that could be a veiled version of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The novel contains a number of publishing references that are familiar to me, particularly the London and Frankfurt Bookfairs and ABA in Chicago.  So reminiscence was an added layer of meaning while reading this tale.  Alan Bennett’s quote from The History Boys resonates:  “The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.  Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead.  And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

The novel opens during WWII. Bowman is a navigator aboard a destroyer in the Pacific.  The man he most admires is his bunkmate, Kimmel, who is known for his sexual exploits.  Bowman is completely inexperienced with women.  During a ferocious kamikaze battle, Kimmel jumped into the water during the attack, abandoning ship as he was convinced the ship’s magazine would blow, only to be picked up by another destroyer that was then almost immediately sunk.  “Kimmel ended up in a naval hospital.  He became a kind of legend.  He’d jump off his ship by mistake and in one day had seen more action than the rest of them would see in the entire war.  Afterwards, Bowman lost track of him.”

I make a point of this as the life Bowman imagined of Kimmel, he eventually tries to create for himself, seeking sexual experience (first through a totally inappropriate marriage to a wealthy and inexperienced young women from a wealthy Virginia family, a marriage which rapidly ends in divorce) and then through what constitutes a slowly revolving door of sexual partners.  These women were all well educated, some married, attracted to Bowman no doubt as he matured into a New York City sophisticate, well connected to artists and writers in particular, the names of which are dropped freely throughout the novel.

Yet, there is the strong theme of Bowman leading essentially a solitary life populated by the activities of his profession and his dalliances.  A couple of these relationships become quite serious, even leading to the thought of a second marriage.  One in particular seems to be heading right there until it explodes into deception and even more startling in the context of this tale, revenge.  It is the only moment in the novel that truly takes the reader by surprise.

It reminds me in many ways of Stoner by John Williams, although that is a much darker tale. There is a sense of “aloneness” in each novel.  These men have their work, work they love, but relationships break down or are fleeting.  Each protagonist marries only once. 

Bowman and Stoner move in different circles, Bowman’s world being the well-traveled, the affluent and sophisticated.  Salter’s characters move in and out of the novel not unlike life itself where acquaintances reappear in the most unlikely places or at the most unlikely times. 

Two such characters (and there are scores of such minor players) in the novel are Neil Eddins, “the other editor,…a southerner, smooth faced and mannerly, who wore striped shirts and made friends easily,” and Charles Delovet a literary agent.  Salter describes a meeting between Eddins and Delovet, and the description is typical of Salter’s prose and the kind of people he writes about:  “In the city one day Eddins had lunch at the Century Club, in the distinguished surroundings of portraits and books, with a successful literary agent named Charles Delovet, who was well-dressed and walked with a slight limp said to be from a ski accident.  One of his shoes had a thick heel though it was not obvious.  Delovet was a man of style and attractive to women.  He had some major clients, Noel Coward, it was rumored, and also a yacht in Westport on which he gave parties in the summer.  In his office he had a ceramic ashtray from the Folies Bergere with a dancer's long legs in relief and, imprinted around the rim: Pour plaisir aux femmes, ca coute cher-women are expensive.  He'd been an editor at one time and he liked writers, loved them, in fact.  He rarely met a writer he didn't like or who didn't have some quality he liked. But there were a few.  He hated plagiarists.”

Salter’s prose – as was the case of Light Years – can be lyrical, evocative, and nostalgic, such as this description of Bowman going to see his ailing mother, leaving New York City by train:  “Bowman came by train, looking out at the haze of the Jersey meadows, marshes really.  He had a deep memory of these meadows, they seemed a part of his blood like the lone gray silhouette of the Empire State Building on the horizon, floating as in a dream.  He knew the route, beginning with the desolate rivers and inlets dark with the years.  Like some ancient industrial skeleton, the Pulaski Skyway rose in the distance and looped across the waters.  Nearer, in a rush, blank factories of brick with broken windows went past.  Then there was Newark, the grim, lost city of Philip Roth, and churches with trees growing from the base of neglected spires.  Endless quiet streets of houses, asylums, schools, all of an emptiness it seemed, intermixed with bland suburban happiness and wholesome names, Maplewood, Brick Church.  The great, smooth golf courses with immaculate greens.  He was of it, from it, and as he rode, unconnected to it.”  I know those sites too, but it takes a special writer to connect the reader to the feelings (“as if a hand has come out and taken yours”).

Salter takes the opportunity to opine on literature’s place in contemporary culture (or lack of place to be more precise) and the decline of publishing (something I felt very acutely at the end my own career):  “The power of the novel in the nation’s culture had weakened.  It had happened gradually.  It was something everyone recognized and ignored.  All went on exactly as before, that was the beauty of it.  The glory had faded but fresh faces kept appearing, wanting to be part of it, to be in publishing which had retained a suggestion of elegance like a pair of beautiful, bone-shined shoes owned by a bankrupt man.  Those who had been in it for some years….were like nails driven long ago into a tree that then grew around them.  They were part of it by now, embedded.” 

The novel’s dialogue is as first-rate as the narrative (he has a good eye and ear for detail), so natural, and sometimes going on for pages.  I will not quote it here, but, as I suspected, Kimmel comes back into the novel, almost like a coda and that dialogue between he and Bowman is as good as it gets.  Real people.  And at times the novel reaches the level of eroticism, unusual for a man of his age, but remembering the “beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.” [John Masefield] 

At the conclusion all things come together, the sea, a woman, a future, even an amusing expression of vanity, shocked by his own aging appearance:  “He had been weeding in the garden that afternoon and looked down to see, beneath his tennis shorts, a pair of legs that seemed to belong to an older man.  He mustn’t he realized, be going around the house in shorts like that….he had to be careful about such things.”

And finally thoughts about death, not too far removed from those anyone his age (or mine) might have:  “He had always seen it as the dark river and the long lines of those waiting for the boatman, waiting in resignation and the patience that eternity required, stripped of all but a single, last possession, a ring, a photograph, or letter that represented everything dearest and forever left behind that they somehow hoped, it being so small, they would be able to take with them.  What if there should be no river but only the endless lines of unknown people, people absolutely without hope, as there had been in the war?  He would be made to join them, to wait forever.  He wondered then, as he often did, how much of life remained for him.  He was certain of only one thing, whatever was to come was the same for everyone who had ever lived.  He would be going where they all had gone and-it was difficult to believe-all he had known would go with him, the war, the butler pouring coffee…names, houses, the sea, all he had known and things he had never known but were there nevertheless, things of his time, all the years, the great liners with their invincible glamour readying to sail, the band playing as they were backed away, the green water widening… and the small boats streaming, following behind.  The first voice he ever knew, his mother's, was beyond memory, but he could recall the bliss of being close to her as a child.  He could remember his first schoolmates, the names of everyone, the classrooms, the teachers, the details of his own room at home-the life beyond reckoning, the life that had been opened to him and that he had owned.”

Essentially this is a work of closure, a statement that life passes quickly and before one knows it there is little to the future and the past cannot be undone.  Yet in his inherent aloneness, Bowman’s life is one of content.

 

A Spot of Bother

Mary, my “virtual friend,” comes through again.   Who knew that some of the more interesting book recommendations would come from someone I haven’t seen in 45 years, an ex-employee who contacted me out of the blue.  She knows my taste in reading better than most, having before recommended The Ha Ha by Dave King and a couple of real classics, Stoner, by John Williams and Wallace Stegner’s The Angle of Repose. 

Maybe she suggested A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon because like the protagonist, George, I’m retired.  Dying is on his mind, not that death itself scares me. Perhaps the way we die might, but if I get lucky, one day I’ll just not wake up.  The real problem is an existential crisis as the world goes on while I return to nothingness from which I came.

So I have to agree with Haddon who writes somewhat amusingly, most men of George’s age thought they were going to live forever….Obviously it would be nice to go quietly in one’s sleep.  But going quietly in one’s sleep was an idea cooked up by parents to make the deaths of grandparents and hamsters less traumatic.  And doubtless some people did go quietly in their sleep but most did so only after many wounding rounds with the Grim Reaper.  His own preferred exits were rapid and decisive.  Others might want the time to bury the hatchet with estranged children and tell their wives where the stopcock was.  Personally, he wanted the lights to go out with no warning and the minimum attendant mess.  Dying was bad enough without having to make it easier for everyone else.

Haddon is an English writer and one better be prepared for some very understated Brit humor to get the most out of this novel, not to mention place and cultural references that might not be altogether familiar to an American reader.  As I read the book I had the vague idea of asking the author whether I could attempt to “translate” the novel into a screenplay, with an American setting and references – it seems to be so ideal for that treatment like the works of similar fellow novelists, Nick Hornby and Jonathan Tropper -- but alas the French beat me to it having already filmed it as Une petite zone de turbulences.

In many ways the novel reminds me of the much underrated Alan Lightman novel The Diagnosis which one could call a “pre-retirement” man’s nightmare of devolving into insanity, a Kafkaesque plight caused by the modern working world.  Unfortunately, I read that novel before I started this blog so to reconstruct it here for comparison purposes I’d have to read it again.  But I was aware of the main character’s dilemma as I read this book.

It is the post retirement world of George, who was a manufacturer of children’s playground equipment, which is the setting for a surreal illness of existential angst in A Spot of Bother.  George is convinced that he has a cancerous lesion, one that has been diagnosed as eczema, so nothing to worry about, right?  Wrong.  A spot of bother, indeed.

His mind was malfunctioning. He had to bring it under control….He needed a strategy. He…drew up a list of rules:

1.       Keep busy.

2.       Take Long walks

3.       Sleep well.

4.       Shower and change in the dark

5.       Drink red wine.

6.       Think of something else.

7.       Talk.

George is a disconnected introvert, and suddenly as I write this I’m thinking of some of Anne Tyler’s men, particularly Liam Pennywell from her novel Noah's Compass. There are definite similarities.

Back to George’s story which is but one of four in this novel, revolving about each other as a diagram of an Atom and its components, a dysfunctional nuclear family and its offshoots.  First, there is the story of George and his wife of many years, Jean.  But Jean has a lover, David, with whom George worked, and thus a second story.  Then there are George and Jean’s two adult children, each with their own tales of love.   Katie is intent on entering into a second marriage to Ray, a blue collar kind of guy, generous and loving to Katie and her son by her previous marriage, Jacob, but not having the “approval” of her family (and she wonders, of herself).  And there is Jamie, who has finally come out of the closet, bewildering his parents, madly in love with Tony, who has rejected him.  Angst to the fourth power.  But George is little touched by this as he slowly descends into a kind of madness, especially after secretly seeing his wife and David engaged in sexual intercourse on his own bed (it’s not a pretty sight and Haddon hilariously captures the moment and George’s reaction).

Yet at the heart of the story is George’s obsession with death which arises even when he is having fun with his grandson, Jacob.  He’s amazed by the child’s skill with technology.  Which was how young people took over the world.  All that fiddling with new technology.  You wake up one day and realize your own skills were laughable.  Woodwork.  Mental arithmetic….Maybe George was fooling himself.  Maybe old people always fooled themselves, pretending that the world was going to hell in a handcart because it was easier than admitting they were being left behind, that the future was pulling away from the beach, and they were standing on their little island bidding it good riddance, knowing in their hearts that there was nothing left for them to do but sit around on the shingle waiting for the big diseases to come out of the undergrowth. Hilarious, but true!

The author writes with in compelling unpretentious style, cramming these stories into one hundred and forty four interconnected chapters (yes, 144 or about 3 pages each).  Yet it’s a very readable, engaging work, full of droll humor and some pathos.  It seems to gather momentum, exhorting you to read on.  All these stories converge in the end, a little too neatly in my opinion. Although the book is not in the same league as the three novels I mentioned at the onset of this entry, Haddon is a talented young novelist, so perhaps his best is yet to come.

 

A Recent Sunset

Tyler Shows Her Age in A Spool of Blue Thread

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. 

My grandfather's Richmond Hill family home circa 1930's