![]() ![]() But for generations, readers have caught echoes of their own parents and siblings in her eccentric characters. They made a little too much of the family quirks.” We might, of course, mutter the same comment about Tyler, who’s been making a little too much of the family quirks since 1964. “But like most families, they imagined they were special. “There was nothing remarkable about the Whitshanks,” she writes. Somehow, what’s familiar seems transcended in these pages, infused with freshness and surprise - evidence, once again, that Tyler remains among the best chroniclers of family life this country has ever produced. But complaining that Tyler’s novels are redundant is like whining that Shakespeare’s sonnets are always 14 lines long. So how can it be so wonderful? The funky meals, the wacky professions, the distracted mothers and the lost children - they’re all here. ![]() In fact, everything about her new novel - from its needlepointed title to its arthritic plot - sounds worn-out. The characters in “A Spool of Blue Thread” look like the same Baltimore family members we’ve socialized with for 50 years in Anne Tyler’s fiction. ![]()
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