Stephanie Jones: Book Review - A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

A Spool of Blue Thread, Anne Tyler’s beguiling, subtle novel about a family named Whitshank, casts an intoxicating spell from the get-go. Picking up the phone one evening while he and wife Abby are getting ready for bed, Red Whitshank hears his erstwhile son, Denny, announcing that he is gay. That this revelation does not turn out to be the centre of the story – in fact, it’s not a revelation at all – is neither surprising nor disappointing.

Such is the gravity and penetration of Tyler’s writing that the most dramatic events, such as the sudden death by car accident of Red’s parents Junior and Linnie Mae, can happen off-stage and rate barely a mention, and the story is no poorer for it.

Now 73, Tyler, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has been writing fiction since she was an undergraduate at Duke University in the early 1960s. Over time, she has honed what has been described as her “style without a style” into some of the finest character studies to be produced by an American writer.

A Spool of Blue Thread is a typical example of her work in that is a sharply observed portrait of an ordinary American family, though the Whitshanks, she points out, are a recent family, short on history, Junior himself dating back only as far as 1926. There is no impressive genealogy or inherited wealth, merely a “talent for pretending that everything was fine.”

So it is, then, that when Denny, the third of Red and Abby’s four children, stumps them with his propensity to withdraw and later seemingly reject his family altogether, life goes on. It falls to Denny’s older sisters and younger brother – whose evolution from Douglas O’Brian to Stem Whitshank is a shimmering piece of wordcraft that harks back to Tyler’s early practice in short-story writing – to negotiate the future of their aging parents. Through the lives of her characters, and predominantly the two central couples, Tyler evokes a mood of relentlessness, of the matter-of-fact passage of time that no living being can evade or defy.

Abby has her notions of how things ought to be, but finds her family proceeds as it likes, regardless. In the previous generation, Linnie Mae acts with a mix of determination and desperation to land her man, who could not have known how fateful his attendance at a church picnic would prove. Only in retrospect does Junior see the woman who will become his lifelong companion setting out to snag him, tracking him down, “yanking his whole life around the way she would yank a damp sweater that she had pulled out of the washtub to block and reshape.”

With its documentary-like gaze at a single family over years, A Spool of Blue Thread can be likened to another current study of an American family, Richard Linklater’s award-winning film Boyhood, which was filmed in annual two-week increments over a 12-year period. Though A Spool of Blue Thread’s gestation was, by all accounts, considerably shorter, the result is much the same – a crystalline view through a peephole into the lives of people as they really are, not as they choose to represent themselves.