A Spool of Blue Thread

The Family Plot

Denny is the kind of son who is often called the black sheep of the family. He appears and disappears at will, leaves no number or forwarding address and calls his parents at bedtime to tell them he is gay, just to stress them out. But he is also his mother’s pet, so that his sister accuses him of  “consuming every last little drop of our parents’ attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us.”

A Spool Of Blue Thread is Anne Tyler’s twentieth novel and she has not tired of dissecting the American family. The book seems to be as uneventful as normal life, but there is enough turmoil simmering under the calm surface of the Whitshank family. The story of four generations is not told in linear fashion, but by the time it ends, the characters have endeared themselves to the reader who might recognize in one of the Whitshanks a member of their own family. Tyler’s expertise lies in making the ordinary fascinating.

Abby Dalton fell in love with and married the placid Red Whitshank, who works in construction, having inherited is father Junior’s business and unique house that he built with his own hands. The family legend tells of how Junior built his dream home for someone else, and then waited patiently for the house to be sold and bought it for his family. His wife Linnie trapped Junior into marriage, by smothering him so that he was unable to escape. What she thinks of as a great romance, was a noose around Junior’s neck.

The other family legend is that of Red’s sister Merrick, who with Whitshank patience, steals her best friend’s fiancé and is then stuck in an unhappy marriage.

Red and Abbie’s daughters have stable but boring marriages, the tension in the family is caused by the hostility the prodigal Denny feels towards the son, Stem, his parents adopted—the boy who turned out to be more of a Whitshank than all the others.  The moving story of how Stem came to be adopted is built into the family album of memories made up of shared holidays, weddings, many joys and little tragedies. There’s even a little dash of suspense.

When it looks like Red and Abbie cannot look after themselves, and stubbornly refuse to move to an assisted living facility,  Stem and is strange wife Nora move into the house with their three noisy kids and dog.  Denny sullenly moves back too, to show that as the real son, he should be the one taking care of his parents. There is the typical mother-in-law and daughter-in-law tussle for supremacy in the kitchen, and a Denny-Stem fist fight.

Tyler narrates the Whitshank saga with sympathy and humour, without judging any of the characters. It would set the reader on a quest to discover Tyler’s other books.

  

A Spool of Blue Thread

By Anne Tyler

Publisher:  Alfred A. Knopf

Pages: 358