This is despite plenty of evidence to suggest they’d always led their own lives. David’s near-drowning is one of the threads that keeps reappearing, with Alice believing it’s the reason he pulled away from his family as an undergraduate. These casual, unintentional cruelties are shown throughout the book, with chapters being presented from different perspectives every ten or so years, spanning 1959-2020. He notes that Alice learned at four, contradicted by her narrative aside that she was actually eight. They’re equally too engrossed in their own interests and ideas of masculinity that Robin forces a traumatized David into trying to learn how to swim. The parents are, in their own ways, so benignly distracted they don’t notice what’s happening between Lily and the 21-year-old man with whom she spends all her time. Robin, who’s been too busy with work to take time off before, “is not a born vacationer.” Mercy is a distracted presence as she gets absorbed in her amateur painting, leaving Alice to keep the family together and wonder whether “she had somehow become older than her mother.” This neatly sets up the interpersonal dynamics and lays the foundations for the perfectly unremarkable, perfectly believable events that follow. They’re introduced, after a slow and somewhat aslant introductory chapter, as they embark on their first ever family holiday. There’s the bossy eldest daughter Alice, boy-crazy teenager Lily, and the serious youngest child David. The multi-generational saga centers on the Garrett family: husband and wife Robin and Mercy, who’ve inherited a plumbing supply store, and their three blue-eyed children.

Yet while accusations of being formulaic hold some truth, the book is perceptive and relatable underneath its “milk and cookies” exterior.

A Bingo-card into all her usual themes, French Braid is set in Baltimore and it deals with family and relationships. Anne Tyler’s 24th novel is unlikely to win her any new fans.

French braid a novel book review