Skip to main content

Clock Dance / Anne Tyler

By
Having recently read a couple books by Alexander McCall-Smith, his wonderful knack for character development reminded me of another skilled author who is adept at drawing well-rounded 3-dimensional characters, Anne Tyler.  I began reading Anne Tyler back in the 1980s with The Accidental Tourist, but it had been many years since I had picked up one of her novels.  Clock Dance was available through the library's eBook service, so I reentered her world of quirky individuals, plotting their course through life.

We first meet Willa as a young girl, trying to navigate a tricky childhood with a mother whose mood swings introduce a difficult dynamic into the home.  Willa holds things together, far too young to be doing so, trying to walk a tightrope and searching for that all important balance, which seems to be a recurring theme throughout her life.  We next meet Willa in college, with a promising career in linguistics ahead.  Instead, she acquiesces to fiance Derek's proposal of marriage which requires her to alter her future plans and concentrate on an immediate pregnancy instead.  Later, Derek suddenly and tragically leaves Willa's life, and we next meet her in her 60s as she enters her senior years in a second marriage to no-nonsense Peter.

This all serves as prologue to a situation that results from an unexpected telephone call from Baltimore.  (Baltimore is always calling, it seems, in Anne Tyler's novels.)  Willa soon finds herself acting as a surrogate grandmother to a young girl named Cheryl while Cheryl's mother (a former paramour of Wilma's emotionally distant son) recovers from an accidental shooting in the leg.  It's all a bit complicated and sometimes stretches credibility, but Willa soon finds a home with these near-strangers in their quirky neighborhood full of quirky neighbors.  

I suppose the lengthy prologue summarizing Willa's early life stages is necessary to show how she always sacrificed her own ambitions, but I had rather hoped that her sister Elaine would come around, and that the story would have a more definitive ending that  bookended the first part.  It's a bit of a lopsided novel, but I enjoyed it nevertheless, and appreciated the wonderful multifaceted characters that I was looking for!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

By
The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation.  Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Here we are / Graham Swift

By
This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.
Post a Comment
Read more

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

By
A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.
Post a Comment
Read more