A Spool of Blue Thread

I picked this up after a run of books that announce their secrets in the first chapter and then spend four hundred pages explaining what the secret meant. I wanted the opposite: no crime, no twist, no body, just a house and a family and the things they never quite say out loud. Anne Tyler gave me that, plus something I did not expect, which is that the silences in this family turn out to have a shape. You can trace them, the way you can trace blue paint, back through four generations.

Alfred A. Knopf published the novel on 10 February 2015, with Chatto and Windus bringing out the UK first edition the same month. The edition I used runs 368 pages and carries the ISBN 9781101874271. It is Anne Tyler's twentieth novel, and it was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. It became a Sunday Times bestseller, which says something about how pleasant the reading is and very little about how good it is.

A phone call in July

The first thing that happens is a telephone call on a hot July evening in 1994. Red and Abby Whitshank are getting ready for bed. The phone rings, Red answers, and his son Denny says something and hangs up. Red puts the receiver down and tells his wife: "Says he's gay."

Red's response is a grunt of annoyance. Abby's is a wail of maternal guilt, because a son who says such a thing must be suffering, and the two of them spend the rest of the night blaming each other for how he turned out. The subject is never mentioned again in the novel. It does not need to be. Denny's anger, and the family's inability to speak about it, are the engine of everything that follows.

The novel's first line is the first sentence of the story Abby always tells, the one she tells on the porch while her family half-listens:

"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon..."

That is how she describes the day she fell in love with Red. She has told it so often that it has worn smooth. Tyler builds the book on the gap between the story the family tells and the story that actually happened, and she is very good at making you want the gap to open.

Denny is the family's loose joint. He has a daughter called Susan and a series of girlfriends whose mothers know him better than his own parents do. He turns up at Thanksgiving, disappears for three years, reappears, plays the French horn until he gets bored of it, and once got the family to a wedding that turned out to be his own. His parents cannot get a straight answer about where he lives, what he does or who he is with, and Abby defends him to the neighbours with a cheerfulness that fools nobody. He is not a villain. He is a man who decided early that being loved by this family is not worth the trouble.

The house on Bouton Road

The house is the other member of the family. Red's father Junior built it in 1936 for a Baltimore textile manufacturer named Brill, and it took him years of arguing and lobbying to buy it from the man once Brill's wife lost interest in maintaining it. Red inherited the construction business and the house with it, and has kept the place in a state of permanent tender repair ever since.

The Whitshanks have two official family stories and they tell them endlessly. The first is Junior's rise, from origins nobody can pin down beyond a guess about the Appalachian mountains, through his own account of being raised among "poor white trash", to the house on Bouton Road. The second is Red's sister Merrick, who took her best friend Pookie's fiancé, a man called Trey Barrister, and married into the Baltimore upper crust, a cautionary tale the family uses to warn itself about the cost of wanting more.

Abby privately admits to having far more stories than that. Her children think they know the family's history. They know a polished version of it, and Tyler spends the novel slowly prising the lid off that version.

The other fixed point of the family's calendar is a rented beach house they have had for decades, where the same neighbours have been in the next house for thirty-six years, doing the same things each August. Tyler is superb on this material: two families ageing in parallel, the same children grown up and married, the holiday itself worn down to a ritual. It is one of the sequences that makes you understand why she is good at this, and it is also a reminder that the Whitshanks measure their lives in inherited patterns.

Four children and one matriarch

By 2012 the parents are in their early seventies and the four children are grown. Amanda and Jeannie, the two daughters, are both married to men named Hugh. Denny is the third. Stem is the youngest, and he is not Abby's son by birth, which is one of the things nobody says directly until a piece of paper turns up in the house.

Abby is a retired social worker who has spent her life arranging other people's problems and cannot now stop arranging her own. Red runs the family business, is hard of hearing, and has had a heart attack in May. He will not wear his hearing aids and he will not sell the house.

Abby's mind is starting to go. She has blank spells, she gets lost on walks and ends up sitting on a neighbour's porch, and she starts calling the dog by the name of the previous dog. Her children cannot agree on what to do with her. Their first instinct is to get everyone back under one roof, so Stem and his wife Nora move in with their three boys, and Denny turns up uninvited, annoyed that nobody asked him. Nora is a churchgoer and a control freak who calls Abby "Mother Whitshank", and the two women circle each other over the kitchen. Abby spent decades wanting all her children home. Having them home turns out to be a different thing entirely.

There is a family meeting at which a retirement community is proposed and refused. Red's view of the arrangement is that houses need humans, and the children are reminded that his hearing aids are in a drawer and that the house is being allowed to go.

Two encounters unsettle the family. At a Sunday lunch a guest called Atta, one of the strays Abby has collected over the years, has no patience for American pleasantries. And at Abby's funeral Merrick, Red's sister, weeps and calls Abby her dearest friend. Nobody in the family knew they were close. It is a neat demonstration of the book's whole argument in one afternoon. Every one of them had a life with Abby that the rest of the family had no access to, and all of them had assumed their version was the real one.

The funeral and the spool of blue thread

Abby goes out for a walk one autumn morning with the dog and does not come back. The dog bolts into the road, she follows it, and a car kills her. The neighbour who finds her says she was singing. The family gathers and discovers that its great matriarch was, in the end, an ordinary woman who wanted to be forgiven for things nobody could quite specify.

Red wears a bright blue dashiki that Abby made for their wedding, and by then it is ragged. Denny looks at it and says he can mend it if he can find blue thread. He opens a closet in his mother's room and a spool of blue thread falls into his hands, exactly the right colour. He says nothing about it at the time.

While the family is sorting through Abby's papers, Stem turns up a contract naming B.J. Autry, an orphan the family once made fun of, as the woman who could take him back if she was ever able. He learns that Abby and Red agreed to raise him only on that condition, and that Red never mentioned it either. Stem asks him not to tell anyone and takes the document away. These are people who love each other. They are also people who have kept paperwork in the same house for fifty years.

Junior and Linnie Mae

Late in the book Tyler drops the frame twice. First she plays out the day in 1959 that Abby has been telling for fifty years and shows how the polished version has a hole in it: Abby was with another boy that day, and something happened that the family retelling leaves out. Then she gives the bigger gift, the story of how Red's father met Red's mother.

Junior was a young man from the backwoods of North Carolina when he met Linnie Mae Inman at a church social. She was thirteen. They slept together, her father caught them in a barn and ran Junior out of the county, and five years later she tracked him down to Baltimore and told him she was not going home. He built the house, bought it, and settled into a life with a wife he did not quite love and could not imagine escaping.

The 1959 chapter is the smaller of the two and it works the same way. Abby's version of that afternoon has a young man, a porch swing and a decision that feels inevitable. The chapter that follows shows a girl of nineteen who is lonely in a way she cannot put into words, and a meeting that the official version has tidied up considerably. Tyler does not say it is a different day. She just shows you what was underneath the story she has been polishing since 1959.

The porch swing is the emblem of that marriage. Brill's wife had wanted a white wrought-iron swing. Junior threw it out and had a plain wooden one made. Linnie Mae had it painted Swedish blue behind his back. He stripped the paint off, varnished the wood and waited to see her face when they moved in. On the morning they arrive, the front steps are covered in thrown blue paint, and Junior thinks that whatever he does, the blue will never come off completely.

The family tells this marriage as an example of patience and constancy. What Tyler gives you is two people who could not compromise, one of them a child, and the other a woman who decided the terms of everything afterwards. It is the coldest writing in the novel and it is also the best.

The last chapter

Red moves out into a small apartment. The house is sold. The family hangs up the cheesecloth ghosts Abby made for Halloween, because Abby always hung them up, and walking past them means getting snagged in swags of cheesecloth the whole way to the car. Red has been dreaming that the house burns down.

Denny drives the family to the train station and, on the way, tells Nora what happened with the thread. It is his mother telling him she forgives him, or telling him she knows he forgives her, and he cannot decide which. The word "forgive" is doing an enormous amount of work in this book, and Tyler never once tells us what Denny did that needed forgiving.

Denny calls his girlfriend Alison and talks her into letting him back into the house to prepare it for a hurricane that is coming. On the train he sits next to a teenage boy who is crying and he decides to let him cry. It is the last we see of him, and it is a good last note: a man who has finally stopped running, sitting still while somebody else falls apart.

What works and what does not

The dialogue is the thing. Tyler writes people talking past each other with real fluency, and the sense of a household in which a sentence can be an argument. The house is drawn with the specificity of somebody who has lived in Baltimore for most of her life, and Red, who keeps the place running on pride and stubbornness, is a quietly devastating character. Abby is harder to love than she is to understand: she is intrusive, she is a fraud, she is a good mother, and she dies the way a Greek play ends, before anyone can tell her anything.

The pace is slow. James Walton in the Telegraph noted that the first 216 pages would have made a satisfying novel on their own and that the flashbacks which follow "remain insufficiently integrated with the rest of the book". Francine Prose admired the "seemingly effortless, leisurely pace", which is a compliment and a warning at once. Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times was blunter, saying the novel recycles virtually every theme she has used before and that Tyler seems to be "coasting on automatic pilot".

The theme itself is not new. Inherited silence has been done by Tolstoy and by half the writers since. What Tyler does is keep it warm. Most family sagas either sentimentalise the past or prosecute it, and Tyler does neither. She writes about a family that loves each other and gets things wrong, and she writes it with an amusement that makes the silences bearable.

Which brings me to the part I would defend hardest. The Junior and Linnie Mae chapters are, for me, a different and better novel than the one in front of them. They are stranger, less comfortable and full of detail that the earlier pages do not prepare you for. Readers who want the whole Whitshank package should know that the last quarter of this book is rougher and more rewarding than the first three quarters. Some reviewers disliked the detour. I did not.

It is a book for readers who like long family sagas and slow emotional work, and who would rather be surprised by a kitchen argument than by a body under the stairs. It is also the gentlest possible introduction to a writer who can be very sharp, and the last two pages are worth the trip on their own.