What Some Folks Will Go and Do

One of the pleasant hazards of writing at home is searching for quotation sources. The brain of my late 40s remains skilled at fishing quotations from the deep murk formed of a lifetime’s reading. Unfortunately, these quotations rarely surface with their sources. Off to the bookshelves.

These deep dives into my home library suck more time than any internet surf. I can lose hours to rummaging. Often my searches lead to the forgotten or unexpected. In this case I wanted Flannery O’Conner’s essay, “Writing Short Stories”. Instead I found Anne Tyler’s 1980 essay, “Still Just Writing”.

Like many women writers, Tyler struggled to balance motherhood, marriage, and writing. She managed a fragile truce with herself. When writing days were lost to sick children, school closures, or her husband’s relatives, she vowed to work on her novel the next day. Now Tyler’s daughters are grown. Her husband, writer and physician Taghi Modarressi, died in 1997. In response to the mother who asked Tyler if she’d found a real job or was still just writing, Tyler just wrote. She wrote her way to worldwide fame and a Pulitzer Prize. She says A Spool of Blue Thread, her 20th book, is her last.

Since that fellow mother’s callous question, America has divided unequally into two camps. The first and larger group worships Tyler. They speak warmly of her insights into family life. They admire the way she builds novels from small moments. They love her Baltimore, the city where all her novels are set. Visitors to this fabled place may purchase maps and make Anne Tyler tours, much as visitors to Hollywood buy star maps.

Disliking Tyler’s writing lands one in the tiny second camp. These people throw up their hands at the same qualities that so please her admirers. Detractors add their frustration with Tyler’s male characters, calling them wimpy. And hasn’t she gotten a bit repetitive?

For years I vaguely associated Tyler with Oprah’s Book Club and People Magazine. Then I started feeling guilty, so I read A Spool of Blue Thread, and felt even worse. But before joining the detractor’s camp, I took a friend’s advice and read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

Here was a snarky, smart aleck son, an insensitive daughter, and an ineffectual son. Hardscrabble parents. The desire for family life. Fights and half-hearted consolations in that direction. Wait! Wasn’t this A Spool of Blue Thread?

Abby and Red Whitshank, now in their early 70s, are lifelong Baltimoreans. They inhabit a fine home built by Red’s father, Junior. Abby is a retired social worker. Red works at Whitshank Construction, a business inherited from his father. Their children, Amanda, Jeannie, Denny, and Stem, are beginning to worry about them.

Tyler spends the first portion of A Spool of Blue Thread establishing the Whitshank family lore, which she just as rapidly dismantles. The qualities that elevate the family from the general populace include a disdain for jeans, an aversion to sweets, and the certainty that their company is preferable to any other. The truth, Tyler writes, is the Whitshanks, Amanda excepted, are slobs. They eat desserts and ignore their in-laws. They “were not remarkable in any way whatsoever. “

The Whitshank family tree is short and lacking in distinction. Junior is self-made, his roots unknown. He may be from Appalachia. Equally little is known about his wife, Linnie Mae. Neither is educated nor polished, a source of pain to Junior, who longs for greater social standing. Of Abby’s family we hear almost nothing.

The house is much fussed over, first by Junior, who builds it for another family, then forces them out so that he may take possession. After Junior’s death, Red moves in with Abby, maintaining the place with ferocious energy. Tyler’s fondness for architectural detail is evident as she describes polished fan blades, sash windows, pocket doors, and the full-length porch.

A Spool of Blue Thread isn’t a novel of crashing conflict followed by satisfying resolution. Instead, we are given adult children with aging parents. The biggest moment comes midway, with a character’s sudden death. Denny is arguably the novel’s major problem.

The third and prodigal son, Denny is a masterpiece of nasty characterization. Tyler has in fact created such an obnoxious character that it’s hard to see why the other Whitshanks pursue him so avidly. Yet they do.

Sullen, aimless, unable to settle down, Denny refuses to stay in contact with the family. Attempts to broach personal topics like marital status or education are met with hostility, as are requests for a working phone number. Like many adults making excuses to avoid maturity, Denny blames Abby and Red for his troubles. Chief among them is Stem.

Stem, so nicknamed in childhood for his vulnerable nape, arrived at the Whitshank home as a toddler. He was never legally adopted. The sketchy details of his parentage emerge only after the death. Only Denny has long known the full truth about Stem, courtesy of constant snooping through Abby’s possessions.

Abby is ditzy, well-meaning, the type who mortally offends without realizing how or why. Downplaying her increasing blank spells and wandering, Abby refuses medical help. Red, meanwhile, is experiencing heart and hearing troubles. To his family’s exasperation, he refuses to wear his hearing aids.

Amanda and Jeannie are less defined. Amanda is an uptight lawyer, unhappily married to the feckless Hugh. Jeannie, also married to a man named Hugh, is a carpenter working for Red. Stem has the same profession and employment. It is Stem who moves into the family home with wife Nora and their children to care for Red and Abby.

Nora is a deeply religious woman, unaware of her beauty. She addresses her in-laws as “Father and Mother Whitshank”, a habit even tolerant Abby finds irritating. Stranger than Nora’s mode of address is her unshakable serenity. She has willingly surrendered her home and privacy to become cook, maid, and caregiver to failing in-laws. Even after Denny turns up, outraged that nobody begged his assistance, Nora never turns a hair. Even the most charitable person would be forgiven a moment’s anger in such a setup, but the most we get from Nora is a case of the giggles. She quickly returns to her usual self, standing to clear the coffee cups.

The weak Tyler male is everywhere in a A Spool of Blue Thread. None are as ineffectual as Dinner at the Homesick Cafe’s Ezra Tull, but Denny’s continual carping, unsupported by any sort of success, rapidly renders him all bark, no bite. Jeannie and Amanda do tell him off, but their anger is fleeting. A physical altercation could be an intensely divisive moment; instead it fades away as Jeannie opens the first-aid case, patching up the offenders. End of chapter.

Red Whitshank becomes a caricature: the silent fixit type whose stubborn deafness makes him a bumbling outcast. And in a novel where no character’s motivation is left unexamined, Stem’s insistence that his adoptive status remain secret is never explained.

Just before the novel’s conclusion, Tyler inserts a section on Junior and Linnie Mae. Red’s parents have small roles in the story, making this sudden narrative shift puzzling. Ultimately it disappoints, for Junior is much like other Tyler men—unable to defend himself and surprisingly quick to capitulate to weaker people.

Despite all this, A Spool of Blue Thread is not a bad book; lousy writers are not awarded Pulitzers. But it was not the book for me.

Tyler’s devotees are a fiercely immovable bunch, and with good reason. The rest of us can appreciate the reasons for their loyalty—strong characterization, sense of place, attention to detail, an eye for domestic life–without joining their ranks.

That Flannery O’Conner quotation? “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.” Actually, O’Conner did not say this; a neighbor of hers did, after reading some of O’Conner’s short fiction. Tyler is an avowed Eudora Welty lover, but it is O’Conner’s old woman down the way that came to mind when I read about the Whitshank family .

Anne Tyler’s essay comes from The Conscious Reader, Sixth Edition, who in turn got it from Janet Sternburg’s The Writer on Her Work.