FICTION
“A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel”
by Anne Tyler
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 368 pages, $25.95
The feeling of loss permeates Anne Tyler’s new novel like smoke, faintly smudging the page.
In “A Spool of Blue Thread,” the longtime Baltimore author’s 20th novel and among her finest, the source of that loss is old age and the rapidly approaching grave. Never before has the theme of onrushing mortality been so prominent in a Tyler novel, and so inescapable.
Though Abby and Red Whitshank are only in their 70s, their increasing frailty worries their adult children enough that the couple’s two sons move home to look after the folks. Red already has had a heart attack, while Abby is having worrisome and increasingly frequent mental lapses.
Abby, an outgoing former social worker and inveterate busybody, and the taciturn Red are the book’s main characters. But “Spool” also travels back and forth in time from the 1920s to the present to weave together the stories of Red’s parents and of his and Abby’s four adult, baby boomer children. The title is a metaphor for the family, which binds together distinct and opinionated individuals half against their wills.
There’s no novelist living today who writes more insightfully (and often humorously) than Tyler does about the fictions and frictions of family life: the tiny, almost invisible slights and misunderstandings, the nagging insecurities, the suppressed hurt feelings.
The author is 73 now, and as she has aged, so have her main characters. Tyler’s last half-dozen novels all have featured men and women in their 50s and 60s and now, in their 70s. In many of these books, Tyler’s characters mourn the deaths of people they’ve loved. But for the first time, a central figure faces a life-threatening crisis.
To be more specific would be to commit the unforgivable sin of revealing Tyler’s plot twists, so let’s just say that this is a novel about letting go. Over the course of the story, Red and Abby both are forced to relinquish things they hold very dear.
It’s worth pointing out that while “A Spool of Blue Thread” doesn’t end tragically, the final pages aren’t particularly hopeful or uplifting.
Tyler’s characters just go on being part of a family. They’re kind to their loved ones and then can’t wait to be rid of them. They figure a few things out, and leave a few other things left undone.
They spin out their lives, one vein-blue thread at a time.
About the Author
