A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

This month it was almost unanimous. Nobody in the group liked A Spool of Blue Thread - except one.

One member described it as a boring book with no storyline to keep the reader interested. At the end of the book she had only learnt that the family had survived which she knew at the beginning. Others said they hoped to escape from their lives through reading books, not be subjected to their own family issues. Others did not finish it.

If you are new to Anne Tyler, this is perhaps not the best of her titles to start with, despite it having been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. She is probably best known for having written An Accidental Tourist, which was made into a romantic comedy staring William Hurt and Geena Davis in 1989. Her 11th book, Breathing Lessons, about the joys and pains of the ordinary marriage of Ira and Maggie Moran won the Pulitzer Prize, also in 1989. Other titles have been shortlisted.

A Spool of Blue Thread is Anne Tyler’s 20th book. She wrote two others after it in 2020, Redhead by the Side of the Road, and this year, French Braid. She will turn 81 in October. As with the other books, her focus in A Spool of Blue Thread is about relationships between members of seemingly ordinary families and their partners and families. (American, white, lower to upper middle class families, it must be said.)

Like peeling back the layers of an onion we are gradually introduced to the various personalities and their secrets, joys, anxieties, jealousies, and struggles. Anne Tyler writes with gentle humour and incredible sparseness of prose. She conveys a great deal of insight in just a few words and some of her paragraphs eulogise family life and relationships in a beautiful way.

Apart from the three generations of the Whitshank family there are at least two non-human characters in this book, a beautiful plain old house without ostentation but with a large porch across the front, built by the patriarch of the family, Junior Whitshank. This is the setting for many key moments of the book, and has “the comfortable, shady air of a place whose inhabitants have long ago stopped seeing it”. There is also an elderly golden retriever, Brenda, who the ageing Abby Whitshank confusedly calls Clarence, forgetting that this beloved black labrador died years before.

The book opens with Abby and her husband, Redclife (Red), Whitshank, getting ready for bed late in the evening, when their estranged son, Denny, rings to announce that he is gay. Red dismisses the assertion with an “Oh, what the hell, Denny!” and Denny hangs up on him. Since Red knows that “this is a kid who got a girl in trouble before he was out of high school” he has a reason to be annoyed, but Abby is all anxiety because no supportive, in-depth conversation has taken place and Denny has hung up with no way for the parents to get back in touch with him.

We spend some pages unravelling details about this strange son, Denny. Why is he so angry, obstinate, and close mouthed (guarding his own privacy but at the same time a snoop into family business, too)? After the trouble with the girl friend as a teenager, he has been packed off to boarding school. After school he refuses to work at the family construction firm, instead working mysterious short term jobs, and then marrying an older woman, Carla, at 22, raising a child with her, Susan, even after they have split up.

He infrequently visits home and when he does, if there’s one question too many from a family member he’s back out the door, sometimes without returning for years. Consequently, he misses many of the family celebrations, holidays and events. It seems that the family just “tiptoes around him” but he nevertheless leaves a hole when he is absent.

Eventually he starts visiting again with his daughter, Susan, and this time leaves his phone number. The family believes Susan has 'smoothed his edges down'. Subsequently, when his sister, Jeannie, suffers post natal depression after her second baby, it is Denny who comes to stay to help look after her since he is apparently between jobs and has the time. Abby is hurt she has not been asked to do this as Jeannie’s mother, but then we learn that Abby has a full time job as a social worker.

What’s more, out of her generosity of heart and social activism, she has over the years often invited oddball down-on-their-luck characters to the family gatherings, which the children dub her 'orphans'. Some of these strangers stay on for weeks. Denny has often made fun of them. One of them proves to be more significant than the rest.

As we read on, we discover that while there is apparently no family history known on either side before 1926 there are two family stories which shed a little light on the personalities of some of the family members.

One is about the grandfather, Junior Whitshank, a fastidious and particular carpenter who owns a business, Whitshank Construction Co. and who originally built the family house in Baltimore in 1936 for a rich couple, the Brills. However, through some trickery he is able to buy it back from them for a good price. By this stage in his life he has a partner, Linnie Mae, and two children, Merrick and Redcliffe, who move with him into the house which is in a smart neighbourhood. However, the Whitshanks’ clearly humble southern origins mean their neighbours won’t have anything to do with them. Nevertheless, Red remembers his childhood growing up in the house as idyllic with groups of young people gathering on the spacious porch for social events as he grows older.

The second family story involves Junior’s daughter, Merrick, who manages to attract her best friend’s fiancé into marrying her, and his family into accepting her, elevating her to a life of great wealth. While Merrick’s actions seem to please Junior, both Junior and Merrick’s ambitions embarrass subsequent generations of the family.

Red, by contrast, marries Abby who is also from humble origins and who Red has known since they were children. Red eventually takes over the Whitshank construction company and moves into the house with his family after his parents both tragically die in an accident.

While Denny is only intermittently on the scene from his late teens, the other three of Red and Abby’s children eventually marry and live within 20 minutes of them, enabling them to get to know six of their seven grandchildren better than Susan.

All of these details are written in the first 60 pages!

We next find out that Abby, at 72, has started ‘disappearing’, both physically, on mysterious walks, and in her head: 'She began to go away somehow even when she was present.' It is as if her mind 'skips across a few minutes like a needle on a record'. We learn that this is in sharp contrast to when she was a young woman, a social activist who was ‘very intrusive into people’s lives’ and ‘sure of her welcome’, ‘utterly lacking in self-consciousness’ and offering people pity, rather than sympathy. All of which has embarrassed and angered her kids - including Denny - over the years.

Next, Red has a slight heart attack and starts to let things go in the house. The three children want their parents to sell up and move into a retirement community. When they refuse and a live-in cleaner doesn’t work out, youngest son, Stem, and his Baptist wife, Nora, move into the house with their three young boys and their dog, Heidi.

Denny hears about this on the grapevine and surprises the family by also moving in. However, none of the family believe he will stay long.

Denny is hurt and angry that he wasn’t asked to come and stay, saying that Stem is not a real Whitshank. It is then that we discover Stem’s real name is Douglas and he is the son of a tile layer, Lonesome (Lawrence) O’Brian, who worked for Red but died suddenly. Stem’s mother has never really been on the scene but Abby and Red decide to ‘look after’ Stem until his mother is in a position to come back and take care of him (which is never).

And so we learn that some of Denny’s problems stem from jealousy of this younger ‘brother’, Stem, who does well at school, goes on to work at Whitshank Construction and is 'more of a Whitshank than Denny is'. Stem is frustrated at Denny’s attitude towards him, in turn, and they come to blows during a family beach holiday. None of them realises this will be their last holiday all together as a family.

Because Abby dies suddenly and the family must now organise the funeral. It is at this time we discover the significance of a spool of blue thread for Denny. Meanwhile, when Red and Stem look for Abby’s instructions about how to organise her funeral, which they know to exist, Stem finds out more about his origins and is no longer trustful of Red. After Red has a medical ‘turn’ after the funeral, the family manages to persuade him he must sell the big house and move into something smaller.

But just when you think you know what the trajectory will be for the rest of the book, the chapter ends and Part 2 begins. We take a surprising leap back into the past and read Abby and Red’s history from when they were in their late teens in 1959. Abby first visits the Whitshanks’ house as a school girl when Merrick as an older girl is her snobbish school mentor and brings Abby home with other children to learn the school song and make cookies. Abby loves the house which is much more expansive than her own humble home and always cool and shady.

We learn that Abby initially goes out with Red’s friend, Dane, (who she says Denny reminds her of, in later life because he is ‘so full of life and so fierce’). When Dane works with Red to get the house ready for Merrick’s wedding, Abby gets to know Red’s mother, Linnie, better and becomes a friend. Linnie tells her some shocking secrets. Later, Red asks her to attend Merrick’s wedding with him and she falls in love with his rock strong steadiness. You are just getting a handle on that when Part 3 begins and you have jumped back in time again to learn the sordid history of Junior and Linnie Mae and how much Junior ends up hating Linnie all his life.

Part 4 brings us back to the present and we return to Denny’s story and his sudden departure in the midst of the family packing up Red’s belongings so that he (Red) can move into his new house.

While Denny is urgently travelling back to his former girlfriend, we hear him asking her to be allowed to return and his promises to her to change: “You’re always asking what on earth is wrong with me, but don’t you think I wonder, too? I’ve been asking it all my life; … I look at how I act sometimes and I just can’t explain it.”

By this stage of the book we may have gathered a few clues to be able to help him.

We can contemplate these things, and wonder about our own family histories and what we do and don't know, when the author leaves us in the last paragraph at the old empty family house where ‘filmy-skirted ghosts frolicked and danced on the porch with nobody left to watch.’

Who is Anne Tyler?

American novelist, short story writer and literary critic, Anne Tyler has published 23 novels.

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in October 1941, Tyler was the eldest of four children. Her father was an industrial chemist while her mother was a social worker. Both her parents were Quakers who were very active with social causes in the midwest and the south. Tyler's earliest childhood was spent in Quaker communities and she didn't attend public school or use a telephone until she was 11.

This unorthodox upbringing enabled her to view “the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise.” She believes her feeling of being an outsider which has followed her most of her life contributed to her becoming a writer.

After secondary schooling, she won a scholarship to study at Duke University and later received a fellowship to graduate school at Columbia University.

She met Taghi Modarressi who was studying to be a doctor at Duke Medical School and they were married in 1963 and had two daughters.

Tyler’s first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964. The couple moved to Baltimore where most of Tyler’s books are set.

Dinner at Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985) and Breathing Lessons (1988) were all finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989.

Tyler has won many other literary prizes and was awarded the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in 2021.

Tyler’s 20th novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Side of the Road was long listed for the same award in 2020.

Critics have praised her for her ‘fully developed characters’, her ‘brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail’, her ‘rigorous and artful style’ and her ‘astute and open language’.