The story rolls on to illuminate that it’s not the geography that is unbridgeable. When Serena and Nicholas finally chat, Nicholas can’t remember which of his two aunts, Alice or Lily, is Serena’s mother, and asks, “I have a cousin named Candle?” James teases Serena that she describes the geographical distance separating the three Garrett siblings - Alice in Baltimore County, Lily in Baltimore City, and David in Philly - as vast, unbridgeable spaces. Serena’s boyfriend, James, finds it amusingly odd that she’s not sure and inexplicable that members of a relatively small family don’t seem to know each other. We’re introduced to the Garretts obliquely, when one of the cousins, Serena, thinks she recognizes another cousin, Nicholas, standing nearby in Philadelphia’s Penn Station. The idea of family as a collection of strangers locked in predetermined roles is front and center in French Braid, with the lines marked from the outset. Tyler takes a family in situ and throws its members at one another to reveal that they are indeed strangers, too - the question is whether any of them will come to recognize the others as individuals and not simply as caricatures permanently stamped with their assigned roles within the domestic hierarchy. Patchett’s usual leaping-off point takes a group of strangers and throws them together into an unusual situation to see what happens. It strikes me that Tyler and Ann Patchett use similar approaches to their work. In Tyler’s fictional families, if anyone actually serves milk and cookies, there’s something vaguely discomfiting about it. Still, there’s a perpetual edge to her stories.
Tyler offers literary comfort food without apology as she noted in a 2015 interview, a reader looks to Philip Roth for “piss and vinegar” and to her for “milk and cookies.”
It is long since readers have understood her universe and eagerly return to it with each new release. There is a phenomenon at work when the quietest possible story with the sparest of plots still compels a reader to sit for hours and let the tale unspool in its own time, content to see where it will go next - even when it’s clear the path is through familiar territory.įrench Braid is Tyler’s 24th novel, and that body of work forms a unified whole of style, place, and character.
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