Who’re the Garretts? Over the course of six decades, from 1959 until 2020, Anne Tyler opens the curtains, roughly once a decade, for the readers to peek into the lives of the Garretts, a white middle-class family in Baltimore. These cross-sections – a family vacation, an anniversary party, a death, a pandemic – are the punctuations during which we get to know the family. Parents become grandparents, a mother withdraws inwards, a wife cheats, and a child learns how to draw. The family comes together, falls apart, utters words that sting, and stays supportive. The novel’s title is itself a clue to Tyler’s method: like a French braid which is woven together from strands that keep working loose, the familial influence sustains even after the members of the family have pulled away.
As the decades pass and the family tree thickens with grandchildren, step-children, cousins, and in-laws, there isn’t room to fully inhabit the interior of the main actors. What we get instead is the evolution of a family’s collective personality over time. The Garretts as an organism, adapting, calcifying, occasionally surprising themselves. This is a book about the long afterlife of family – the ways its patterns persist, its silences travel, its habits of love and withdrawal get passed down like heirlooms nobody remembers acquiring.
Take Mercy Garrett, mother of three, who was never matronly. When they go on their first vacation, 18 years after their marriage, she’s happy to exercise her painting skills, mostly unaware of the whereabouts of her kids. We see Alice, the 17-year-old daughter, step in and creatively cobble together lunches and dinners with what they have in the pantry. Lily, the 15-year-old, can’t wait to take flight with a boyfriend, any boyfriend. David, the 8-year-old, is reserved and insightful. Robin, the father, a man of limited emotional range who loves his family but doesn’t really know how to express it, drifts aimlessly. What we don’t see in this week-long vacation is all of them sharing a family meal. And yet Tyler makes it clear that the family is not failing at closeness. It’s doing exactly what families do – orbiting each other, assuming the others will be there, learning their habits of absence and presence that will echo across the next sixty years. The family members care for each other, but there’s more self-concern than love.
After David leaves home for college and they become empty nesters, the unsophisticated Robin wonders if they’ll have the freedom to have sex on the living room floor. He has absolutely failed to see that his wife of 27 years only stayed together because that’s what society expected of her. She moves out, but with such gentleness that it doesn’t break Robin’s heart. She wanted to be a painter when she was young. And now that the kids are out, she starts afresh. It takes more than a decade and she achieves modest success. We see a friend of hers from art school who has made it big in New York. But she holds no grudges about how her life has turned out. She says “everybody runs their own race.” What Tyler doesn’t let us forget, though, is that Mercy’s race was delayed by two decades. The painting that now fills her apartment was always there, compressed into the corner of a family home. Her withdrawal – from meals, from itineraries, from her children’s whereabouts – was not neglect so much as a form of survival. She was already practicing solitude, long before she had it.
Meanwhile David, Mercy’s son, has a lot less respect for societal conventions. He feels he’d been shackled by his family and once out of home for college, his ties back home suffer a severe setback. Though he lives only a couple of hours away, he comes home only a handful of times, like for his parents’ 50th anniversary. He feels like there’s no love lost between him and his siblings or parents. But the man’s capacity for love is concentrated and pours out only to his nuclear family. His love for his wife, step-daughter and son has left him with nothing for the rest of society. When the pandemic hits, he’s quite happy to not have his friends come over. What David doesn’t see, and what Tyler lets us see, is that he has become – in the very act of fleeing – a more concentrated version of his mother. Mercy withdrew from her family and into her painting; David withdrew from his parents and siblings and into his kids. David inherits a flavor of withdrawal that is both like and unlike his mother. The family braid holds even when you’ve convinced yourself you’ve cut free.
There are slices of lives of sons-in-law and grandkids we get to know along with the daughters Alice and Lily. Having seen these people grow and change over decades, we feel like we know them. Lily, after an adventurous start to her life, finds herself in a vulnerable position: married and pregnant with another man’s child. She decides to tamp down her hormones and settle down. But we see the same Lily in top gear in her 60s, after she has seen her kids off. Just like her mother. Among the grandchildren, there is one who keeps his own counsel on who he is. He never comes out, not exactly, but Tyler shows us his aunts absorbing the knowledge of him quietly, without ceremony, finding small ways to signal that he is seen and held. It is one of the novel’s more tender moments: not a declaration or a confrontation, but a kind of wordless family grammar, the understanding that passes between people who have watched each other long enough to read the silences.
Tyler is suggesting that we are not simply shaped by our families in childhood and then released out into the world. We carry our family forward as an internal weather system – our patterns of withdrawal, our thresholds for intimacy, our particular ways of being alone in a room full of people. The family is ongoing: you push against it when you are inside it and you reach for it when you are not. You swear you will not become your mother, and then one day, like David, you notice the strong resemblance to your mother. So, who’re the Garretts? They are the crimp that stays in the hair long after the braid has come undone.