French Braid
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Narrated by:
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Kimberly Farr
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By:
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Anne Tyler
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
The major new novel from the beloved prize-winning author -- a brilliantly perceptive, painfully true and funny journey deep into one family's foibles, from the 1950s right up to the changed world of today
When the kids are grown and Mercy Garrett gradually moves herself out of the family home, everyone determines not to notice.
Over at her studio, she wants space and silence. She won't allow any family clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond.
Yet it is a clutter of untidy moments that forms the Garretts' family life over the decades, from giving a child a ride to a painstaking Easter lunch, a fateful train journey to an unexpected homecoming.
And it all begins in 1959, with a family holiday to a cabin by a lake. It's the only one the Garretts will ever take, but its effects will ripple through the generations.
'If Anne Tyler isn't the best writer in the world, who is?' BBC RADIO 4 WOMAN'S HOUR
© Anne Tyler 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
Critic reviews
Sixty years of a family plaited together
I loved this and found it profoundly moving. Anne Tyler born in 1941 is especially qualified to write this poignant chart of the Garett family through six decades from 1959 right up to the Pandemic, revealing how the sprawling legacy of members’ traits and actions ripple through the generations, braided together as in a French braid. (a French plait to me). Thus 7 year-old David, a quirky solitary little boy on the family lake-side holiday at the beginning, ricochets through life and at the end is a fond grandfather, never having recovered from his father’s harsh misjudged attempt to make him swim on that childhood trip.
Tyler’s skill is in making ordinary lives totally involving and so startlingly real in all their complexities that they live on beyond the page. A natural death (I won’t spoil it, there are bound to be many but you’ll know which one) is truly shocking. Listeners will identify with many themes, marriages and situations: Mercy breaks away from her husband when the children have left home, not because she can’t stand him, but because she wants to paint in a studio of her own and be HER. There’s the joys of little children and the visceral sense of loss as they turn into sometimes disappointing adults balanced by the comforts of grand-parenting. She is equally insightful on men as well as women and of course the subtle complex relationships between them .
It takes tremendous skill to create these family networks , to maintain interest and to trigger the listener’s thoughts and empathies by a passing comment or a turn of phrase.. Mercy muses in passing on marriage on how the quality initially found most attractive in a spouse can become the most loathed with time. The many similes are sewn in so subtly they can be missed: fungus on a tree stick out like CDs when you press eject. Yes they do! Robin remembers the ‘mute damp misery’ of his mother abandoned by his father ‘curled like a comma on the sofa’ throughout his childhood, making him the man he grew to be.
So much to enjoy, think about and remember. Beautifully read too.
Sixty years of a family plaited together
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Narrated excellently by Kimberley Farr.
Exquisite
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Wonderful observation and telling of a family
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Disappointing Anne Tyler
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Lovely family saga
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