He takes his toys to the beach and enjoys playing quietly with them, inventing scenarios for them to act out. He’s a happy child, excited at the prospect of new and exciting experiences. Two of their three children are not enjoying themselves: seventeen-year-old Alice feels too grown up to enjoy travelling with her family, and fifteen-year-old Lily is furious at being parted from her boyfriend. His wife Mercy has insisted on bringing her painting materials on holiday she doesn’t enjoy cooking though she makes fancy desserts.
Robin Garrett is a plumber, and doesn’t see the point of vacations. Many seeds are sown in this first chapter which will be explored in the chapters that follow.īack in 1959, the Garrett family are at the start of their first ever family vacation, a week in a ‘rustic little cabin’ at Deep Creek Lake. On the train, Serena reflects that ‘even when the Garretts did get together, it never seemed to take, so to speak’ she finds herself longing for the journey to end so she can be on her own again. Serena has five, but they rarely see each other – there are no great family reunions, just occasional meetings at weddings and funerals.
Her boyfriend James is bemused by her uncertainty – he has eleven cousins and would recognise them all.
It’s 2010, and she’s at the Philadelphia train station waiting to go home to Baltimore when she spots a young man who may or may not be her cousin Nicholas. In French Braid there is plenty of opportunity to observe such small events and their ripple effect on the characters, as the timespan of the novel starts in 1959 and ends in the present day.īefore launching into 1959, though, Tyler introduces Serena Drew, a graduate student. As Ann pointed out in her Shiny review of Tyler’s previous book, Redhead by the Side of the Road, the author has said that plot gets in the way of of her real concern, the development of character. If you’re a lover of exciting plots with plenty of action, this is not the book for you. And that, essentially, is what the novel is about: the way small events within a family have repercussions through the generations. An ageing couple, David and Greta, are getting ready for bed, and an image has come to David’s mind of the way his sister Emily used to braid her hair: ‘They would start with two skeins of hair up near her temples, very skinny and tight, and then join in with two thicker braids lower down….and then when she undid them, her hair would still be in ripples…’. Here, not many pages before the end of Anne Tyler’s latest novel, finally comes the explanation of the title.
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