An Exquisite Chronicle of an Ordinary American Family
French Braid by Anne Tyler (Vintage Books, 2023)
Reviewed by Jenifer Elmore
Anne Tyler’s twenty-third novel contains even less action than most of her novels, and that’s saying something. Nothing seems to happen, and yet multiple generations of human lives happen in this brilliantly told story that follows—or repeatedly drops in on—three and a half generations of one Baltimore family.
Spanning from World War II to the COVID pandemic, French Braid centers on the lives of Robin and Mercy Garrett, who have been married since 1940, and their three children, their sons- and daughters-in-law, their seven grandchildren, and one of their great-grandchildren. Each of the eight chapters takes place in different years, starting in 2010, when two of the Garretts’ grandchildren meet by chance in a train station. The next chapter rewinds half a century to 1959, and the novel progresses chronologically from there to 2020 in chapters that leap forward from seven to seventeen years at a time.
Though Robin and Mercy in a sense dominate the novel as the patriarch and matriarch of the tribe, only two of the novel’s eight chapters are told from their respective points of view. They dominate the story in the same way that real parents dominate the psyches of their children: first looming large, then sometimes only hovering in the distance, but always visible in the rear-view mirror. Besides taking place in different years, the eight chapters are narrated from eight different perspectives—one each for Robin and Mercy, one for each of their children, and three from the third generation. The different perspectives, coming from characters of different ages in different eras, make this novel feel larger than the sum of its parts.
Yet, in Tyler’s characteristic style, French Braid is an epic of the ordinary. Tyler presents her characters’ lives as a steady flow of quotidian routines and repeated interactions on the exterior, and a steady flow of largely repetitive monologues on the interior. That may sound realistic to the point of excruciating, like William Dean Howells and Henry James cowriting a novel, but Tyler’s telling details, subtle variations on the patterns, and complex humor render the repetitions both meditative and delightful.
As a case in point, at every family gathering in the novel, when a new carload of relatives enters the house, the men already there immediately ask the man who just arrived how the traffic was. The participants change places and vary over time, but the exchanges are in essence identical. Tyler’s narrators, even when coming from a female perspective, never acknowledge or comment on the predictability of this small talk, so these potentially mind-numbing exchanges morph into masterfully delivered deadpan comedy. The reader learns to anticipate the chuckle, wondering if maybe something surprising will come of this routine later. The surprise that comes is not in the novel at all, but in the reader, who eventually realizes that what seemed inane has somehow been both necessary and endearing all along.
That’s the magic of French Braid, but it’s not all magic. The title, for example, is explicated (yes, “explicated” is the right word) in the only downright clunky passage in the whole novel. In a book full of powerful extended metaphors developed with just the right touch, the title metaphor is the only weak one.
Consider also the gender stereotypes. Sometimes they’re comical, as with the men’s conversations on the traffic. Sometimes they’re profound, as with the men’s conversations on the traffic. Sometimes they’re in between, as with the lifelong alienation that David experiences after his father’s emotional betrayal in a dad-cliché of a “sink or swim” episode during the family’s one and only vacation. In the case of Alice’s domestic control issues, the stereotype is mildly offensive. But even when this novel isn’t magic, it’s never simplistic.
Upon reflection, the stereotyping of Alice comes in chapters focalized through other characters. The chapter narrated from Alice’s own perspective isn’t offensive at all as it sensitively reveals that her desire for control, which intensely annoys her family throughout the entire novel, was born from her mother’s lack of emotional investment in that family. In a different chapter, Alice’s sister Lily “didn’t feel like Mercy’s daughter. Or more accurately, she didn’t feel that Mercy was any kind of mother. She felt Mercy was like those cats who fail to recognize their own kittens after they’ve grown up” (113).
On the other hand, the most prominently gender-loaded chapter of the novel, which narrates Mercy’s gradual move out of her marital home, has garnered considerable attention among reviewers. One of the back-cover blurbs, taken from Jennifer Haigh’s assessment in The New York Times Book Review, calls French Braid “a quietly subversive novel, tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging.” Hmm. Yes and no, or at least no more than it tackles fundamental assumptions about manhood and male aging. Mercy’s chapter also combines gender stereotypes and feminist literary tropes that have themselves become stereotypes. At times it reads like a contemporary adaptation of Chopin’s The Awakening: whoa, turns out Mercy the housewife and mother is really Mercy the artist who has always dreamed of living alone in a loft studio and focusing on her painting!
To be fair, though, the extent that individuals can craft their own identities versus the extent that their families create identities for them is a serious theme in this novel and in much of Tyler’s oeuvre. Unlike Chopin’s Edna, Mercy manages to reinvent her life on her own terms without losing her dignity, without chasing after younger men, and without committing suicide. As she unapologetically explains to her granddaughter Candle, “Sometimes people live first one life and then another life…. First a family life and then later a whole other kind of life. That’s what I’m doing” (184). Mercy’s unconventional choice in midlife is not the most moving part of the novel, but it throws the other characters’ choices into relief. Their reactions to that choice—admiration, condemnation, acceptance, denial—ultimately reveal much more about themselves than about Mercy.
Tyler depicts these characters’ actions, for lack of a better word, in such quietly reflective, subtle terms that they give the impression of having taken place while the reader was looking at something else. Even the most dramatic scene in the novel—the death of Mercy—happens while she dozes on a train, and not even the granddaughter sitting next to her notices that she’s dead. In retrospect, her death is narrated meticulously, but the reader doesn’t know that it’s a death at all: “Her grandmother, though, was silent, and when Candle glanced toward her some time later she found her sound asleep, her head tilted against the window,” and then, “Mercy slept on, her handkerchief gradually uncurling itself on her lap” (198-199). With even less drama, her husband Robin’s death less than a year later occupies half of one sentence in a subsequent chapter. By not showcasing the few deaths that occur, and just barely acknowledging that any grieving results, Tyler keeps French Braid sharply focused on life. Yes, people die, she seems to say, but stories are about everything comes before.
More than anything else, though, it’s the novel’s unique structure that turns what might have been tedious into something profound. Nothing much seems to happen—but over and over again, in so many different voices, through so many different eyes, and in so many different decades, that the patterns and the lessons sink in deep. The result is enchanting, comforting, and lasting.
Jenifer Elmore is Professor of English at Palm Beach Atlantic University and has lived in Florida for more than thirty years. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and is the editor of Catharine Sedgwick’s 1824 novel Redwood: A Tale (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
