French Braid: A novel

by Anne Tyler

Hardcover, 2022

Status

Available

Call number

Tyl

Genres

Publication

Knopf (2022), 256 pages

Description

"The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever venture beyond Baltimore, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understands. Yet as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influence on one another ripples unmistakably through each generation, much like French-braided hair keeps its waves even after it is undone. Full of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close--yet how unknowable--every family is to itself"--… (more)

Original publication date

2022

Media reviews

Washington Post

The insular Baltimore family, the quirky occupations, the special foods — they all move across these pages as predictably as the phases of the moon. There are times when such familiarity might feel tiresome. But we’re not in one of those times. Indeed, given today’s slate of horror and chaos,

the rich melody of “French Braid” offers the comfort of a beloved hymn. It doesn’t even matter if you believe in the sanctity of family life; the sound alone brings solace.

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New York Times

But “French Braid” is the opposite of reassuring. The novel is imbued with an old-school feminism of a kind currently unfashionable. It looks squarely at the consequences of stifled female ambition — to the woman herself, and to those in her orbit. For all its charm, “French Braid” is a

quietly subversive novel, tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging.

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Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Oh, the lengths this family would go to so as not to spoil the picture of how things were supposed to be!" Tyler writes. It is lines like that one — seemingly tossed off by the omniscient narrator, a great skill of Tyler's — that bring heft to this largely plotless book. "French Braid" is

filled with piercing observation.

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The Guardian

French Braid may not upend a fan’s ranking of Tyler’s novels, in the way Redhead By the Side of the Road was a late entry, but it’s thoroughly enjoyable, and at this point any Tyler book is a gift. Funny, poignant, generous, not shying away from death and disappointment but never doomy or

overwrought, it suggests there’s always new light to be shed, whatever the situation, with just another turn of the prism.

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