![]() He flashes in and out of family's life unable to settle. They have four adult children, but it's their third child Denny who is the wayward black sheep. ![]() At the start we're introduced to the Whitshanks who live in the perfect suburban home. In “A Spool of Blue Thread” she takes a new approach to this by writing a family saga which moves backwards through the generations. It's this daily risk which makes the finely constructed domestic detail of her narratives both terrifying and thrilling. In Tyler's fiction people can walk out the door one evening to become someone new or wake in the morning to see that their partner of forty years is someone they've always hated. Even though we can spend our lives with people we're linked to by blood or marriage and we can know their habits, we cannot know what's truly in their hearts. ![]() Of course there are a multitude of possibilities in life and we can't choose them all because we're caught in the unstoppable flow of time which necessarily limits the options we have. What if this life you've worked so hard for is something you wake up wanting to escape from? What if the people closest to you and the family you've known all your life turn out to be strangers? Tyler presents these insolvable dilemmas by following the daily life of her characters while also acknowledging the absurdity and uselessness of the questions. ![]() It's always felt to me that at the centre of Anne Tyler's novels about genteel middle class Baltimore life there is horrific fear. ![]()
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