Quirky families

Hundreds of novels are set in New York, San Francisco, LA and so on, but how many novels are set in Baltimore? It might seem too matter-of-fact a city to inspire literary creations, but in fact one of America’s best novelists sets most of her novels here. Anne Tyler’s characters are regular middle-class residents of Baltimore, and each of them is sharply-drawn, somewhat unusual, and always memorable.

Three Days in June follows Gail, a Baltimore middle-aged school administrator who is told that social interactions are not her strong point.

No one had ever told me before that I lacked people skills. Not in so many words, at least. It was true that my one-time mother-in-law had given me a copy of Manners for the Mystified, but that was just .. pro forma, right? All brides could use an etiquette book! She didn’t mean anything by it.

Gail is indeed very matter-of-fact and to-the-point, but this is not one of those books (increasingly common these days) where the protagonist is far “on the spectrum”. Gail is just, perhaps, unusually focused and calm, which can come across as callous and unfeeling, but she is very intelligent, and most of all, able to examine her own actions and reactions, and change them.

The three days of the title fall around the wedding of Gail’s daughter Debbie. It’s a small wedding, but there is tension between the grandiose plans of the groom’s mother and the minimalist wedding desired by Debbie and her mother. Debbie and Gail decide on

no puffy long dress with a train or whatever, and no flower girls and no choir.

The fact of the wedding means that Gail’s daughter is joining another family, and Gail is both critical and envious.

Here came [the mother], dark-haired and stylish and looking way younger than me.

I wished, wished, wished that Debbie hadn’t chosen Elizabeth [her new sister-in-law] to be her maid of honor! Why not Bitsy, for heaven’s sake, or Caroline [old friends]? But maybe that was a matter of politics — cementing the relationship with her future sister-in-law. (And also, perhaps, avoiding the need to choose one equally close friend over another). [..] This Elizabeth, with her butter-wouldn’t-melt expression and her don’t-care outfit!

Debbie’s father (and Gail’s ex) Max is in town for the wedding and lands up at Gail’s along with his cat. Max is an appealing character: sweet-natured, kind-hearted, and cheerful, but his annoying personality is also laid out for the reader.

He [had] a rambunctious dog that he hadn’t asked permission for, and he generated hillocks of clutter wherever he sat, and he played his radio too loudly and stayed up too long after the rest of us had one to bed.

Boundaries: that was his problem. He lacked boundaries.

The night before the wedding, Debbie tearfully lets out that her fiance has been unfaithful. A decade or two ago, Max and Gail got divorced because of a similar unfaithfulness by one of them, so the parallels are obvious. Will the wedding proceed? What long-buried resentments will emerge in its wake?

This novel includes many of Anne Tyler’s themes: a slightly disfunctional but yet commonplace family in Baltimore, a protagonist who is somewhat OCD (a theme that was most evident in theThe Accidental Tourist, where post-separation Macon’s routines get weirder and weirder, but are still completely believable), and an event (a holiday, a wedding, a funeral) around which the novel plays out. Some readers complain about this repetition across novels, but I think that Tyler’s characters are quite original and memorable, with no two the same.

This is a short novel, and very easily read, so I’ll just say that it’s worth reading. Anne Tyler’s gentle novels and quirky characters are easy to enjoy and admire.

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