Review by New York Times Review
IN 1986, Anne Tyler wrote an appreciation in this newspaper of one of her favorite childhood books, "The Little House," by Virginia Lee Burton. The book was a gift, she wrote, one she received in 1945 on her fourth birthday and has kept ever since. It tells the story of a house, built in the countryside but eventually engulfed by a burgeoning city, then moved, years later, to a new place in the country. Although the story is simple, Tyler wrote, "It seemed I'd been presented with a snapshot that showed me how the world worked: how the years flowed by and people altered and nothing could ever stay the same." This preoccupation with time - how people weather both the cruelty and the comforts of passing years - has long been a part of Tyler's work. Like the house in that children's book, her best characters have a way of revealing themselves through their steadfastness, even (or especially) during wrenching changes. For Willa Drake, first encountered as an 11year-old doggedly keeping things together through her mother's various dramatic exits from the family, an early marriage offers a chance to build her own, more solid, home life. It also forces her to cut short her education as she raises two sons; after enduring unpredictability as a child, she has tried above all "to be a good mother," Tyler writes, "which to her meant a predictable mother." In doing so, we realize when we meet Willa at 61, married the second time round to a semiretired lawyer, that she has become sadly predictable, even to herself. A stranger's phone call pulls Willa into a brand-new life. It turns out that the former girlfriend of one of Willa's sons has been injured and hospitalized, leaving no one to care for her young daughter. Scanning some numbers by the woman's phone, the stranger mistakes Willa for a grandmother of sorts. Lacking much of anything better to do, Willa decides to go for it. A good portion of Tyler's 22nd novel, "Clock Dance," takes place in Baltimore, the author's adopted hometown and one she's made use of in many previous novels, including 1988's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Breathing Lessons" and 2015's "A Spool of Blue Thread." Unlike in those books, whose characters mostly lived comfortably, here the setting itself is a little unsettled; Willa and her husband, Peter, arrive from their pristine Arizona retirement to a disheveled stretch of "small, dingy white houses with squat front porches, some of them posted with signs for insurance agencies or podiatry offices." The block, it soon becomes clear, is kind and quirky but a little off-kilter: a Baltimore neighborhood that could be the offspring of Mr. Rogers and John Waters. Here, in one of those little houses, live Denise (the former girlfriend), Cheryl (her daughter) and Airplane (yet another of Tyler's very real and lovable fictional dogs). Like Dickens, Tyler sketches a well-peopled larger community, bustling with friends, lovers and bit players. But the book's real action centers on Willa and how, in lending Denise and especially Cheryl some of her steadiness and predictability, she reclaims something of her younger self: a bolder, messier person than the superficial one she'd become, the "cheery and polite and genteel" woman who ended up living near a golf course and wearing expensive clothes. The title comes from a game Willa watches Cheryl and two friends playing: the girls' arms all arms of a human clock, ticktocking through a summer afternoon. In the world of children, and of a newly chosen family, Willa finds herself altered - or, perhaps, finds her unalterable self. Despite her many accolades, Tyler is sometimes dismissed for her books' readability, for their deeply familiar pleasures. And she can occasionally spout a cliché ("Sometimes Willa felt she'd spent half her life apologizing for some man's behavior"). However, it's usually the kind of line that's a cliché because it's true. When I told a friend I was reading Anne Tyler, she said, "Oh, my mother loves her books!" In the world of serious literature, this is not a raving endorsement. But, just like Virginia Lee Burton's "The Little House," the novels of Anne Tyler seem simple because she makes the very difficult look easier than it is. Her books are smarter and more interesting than they might appear on the surface; then again, so are our mothers.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Tyler, a master of homey enchantment and sly social evisceration whose storytelling finesse has propelled more than 20 novels including A Spool of Blue Thread (2015) and her clever contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series, Vinegar Girl (2016) now delivers an especially lithe and enlivening tale. Willa Drake is a sensitive, patient, and determined 11-year-old in 1967, with a gentle father and a mercurial and wounding mother. In this ensnaring novel's first half, Tyler ticktocks through Willa's life as she becomes a college student, a wife and mother of two sons in California, a young widow, and a new wife to a golf-loving, semiretired executive in Arizona. Willa is neat, sweet, pretty, and gracefully acquiescent, until she receives a phone call from Baltimore, where Denise, a betrayed ex-girlfriend of Willa's older son, is in the hospital after an accidental shooting, leaving her young daughter and dog alone in their humble home. There is no tie between them, yet Willa feels summoned, and then, as she makes herself useful on a funky city block among motley, struggling, warmhearted neighbors, she feels needed. And liberated. Tyler's bedazzling yet fathoms-deep feel-good novel is wrought with nimble humor, intricate understanding of emotions and family, place and community and bounteous pleasure in quirkiness, discovery, and renewal. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Quintessential Tyler, this brilliant, charming, and book-club-ready novel of quiet transformation will be heralded with a major promotional campaign.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer winner Tyler (following A Spool of Blue Thread) takes a bittersweet, hope-filled look at two quirky families that have broken apart and are trying to find their way back to one another. Plaintive Willa is the link between her own fractured Pennsylvania family-rebellious sister Elaine, long-suffering dad Melvin, and "tempestuous" and abusive mom Alice-and that of lonely Baltimore single mom Denise and her precocious, love-starved daughter, Cheryl. The novel's first half follows Willa as she negotiates her troubled teenage years in the 1960s and her 20s and 30s in the '70s, her reluctant marriage to college sweetheart Derek, and her late-in-life second marriage with stuffy retiree Peter. The narrative then jumps to 2017, when Willa gets a breathless call to come to Baltimore to help take care of Cheryl, the young daughter of her son's recent ex-girlfriend, as Cheryl's mom, Denise, recovers from a mysterious shot in the leg. There, Willa settles amiably in a neighborhood of misfits, hooligans, and steely survivors-and explores her own family miseries. The cast of sharply drawn characters dominates in ways both reflective and raucous across a series of emotional events, such as Willa's baffling encounter with a would-be hijacker, a heartbreaking moment with her elderly dad, and the jolting advice she receives from a kindhearted doctor. It's a stellar addition to Tyler's prodigious catalogue. 250,000-copy announced first printing. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Having survived an abusive mother and a father she compares to Gandhi, Willa Drake struggles to find meaning in a life without direction or purpose. She marries before finishing college and raises two sons before finally completing her degree. Her first husband is killed in a road rage accident just as her boys begin to exit into their own adult lives, and after marrying a second time, she ends up a golf widow in Arizona. Out of the blue, she receives a phone call about the ex-girlfriend of her older son, who has been shot and needs childcare for her nine-year-old daughter (not Willa's granddaughter). Soon, Willa finds herself in a closely knit, blue-collar Baltimore neighborhood. Welcomed by the people there, she discovers a little girl aching for a grandmother, a crying need in the community for her time and talents, and, finally, what's missing in her life. Pulitzer Prize winner Tyler (A Spool of Blue Thread) does not disappoint. Her characters are distinctly drawn and their stories layered like a Venn diagram over the central character. The result is a compelling look at the need for relevance, being offered a second chance, and deciding whether to take it. VERDICT Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 2/26/18.]-Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
After a lightweight foray into rewriting Shakespeare (Vinegar Girl, 2016, etc.), Tyler returns to her tried-and-true theme of family life's emotionally charged complexities.Eleven-year-old Willa Drake doesn't really understand the fraught interchanges between her volatile mother and maddeningly mild-mannered father that roil the novel's opening chapter, set in Pennsylvania in 1967. But as the action leapfrogs to 1977 and she impulsively decides to marry college boyfriend Derek after he stands up to her mother on their first meeting, we see that, in a world of self-dramatizers and placaters, Willa has unconsciously decided to be a placater. The chapter detailing Derek's death in a California road-rage incident in 1997 suggests that Willa's placatory pattern is firmly set, an impression buttressed as Part II begins with 61-year-old Willa now married to Peter, another man who patronizes her and expects her to cater to his every whim. But then comes a phone call from Baltimore, where her son's ex-girlfriend Denise has been hospitalized with a broken leg after a mysterious shooting incident by a neighbor under the mistaken impression that Denise's daughter is Willa's granddaughter. This brazenly schematic setup for Willa's late-life regeneration is redeemed by the fact that it's utterly characteristic of our maddeningly mild-mannered heroine that she not only doesn't correct the misunderstanding, but gets on a plane to Baltimore, with Peter in tow complaining all the way. Power dynamics are never simple in Tyler's portraits of marriage, and when Willa needs to, she quietly gets what she wants. As she gets to know Denise's prematurely mature daughter, Cheryl, and the array of eccentric folks on their slightly seedy blockall vibrantly portrayed with Tyler's usual low-key gusto and bracingly dark humorreaders will want Willa to see that others appreciate her sly wit and tolerant acceptance of people's foibles as whiny Peter does not. But will she? Tyler drags out the suspense a tad longer than the slight plot merits.More predictable and less profound than her most recent full-scale work (the magical A Spool of Blue Thread, 2015), but Tyler's characteristic warmth and affection for her characters are as engaging as ever. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
