The two parts of
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Tyler’s new book Clock Dance do
not quite come together, and a seemingly significant incident has
no follow through, but once the second part gets going, it is delightful.
Tyler establishes soon
enough that Willa Drake is the kind of woman “whose prime objective was to be taken for granted.” She
wants to study further but raises only mild objections when her college
boyfriend insists on marriage. When she is flying home with Derek to meet her
parents, the man seated next to her, sticks a gun into her ribs and threatens
her to keep quiet. But he doesn’t do anything, and quickly leaves the airport
when the plane lands. Nevertheless, Willa is shaken by the incident, and
expects some sympathy when she tells her parents and Derek, but she is not
taken seriously.
Another woman might have had second
thoughts about marrying such a self-absorbed man, but Willa does not want to
hurt anyone’s feelings. Tyler writes with amusement at how she pays rapt
attention to the flight attendant’s pre-flight instructions, so that she
doesn’t feel ignored.
Willa gives birth to two sons, Sean and
Ian, who show her no particular affection. Her husband is killed in a car crash
in an incident of road rage. There is a small spike of excitement when the man
whose car had hit
Derek’s comes to meet Willa, but a potential of friendship between two lonely
people is not explored. The
book then takes a leap, when she is settled in Arizona with her solemn second
husband, Peter, who condescendingly calls her “little one,” even
though she is over sixty. Tyler does not say how and when Willa married Peter,
but her comfortable life has obviously been without much excitement or colour.
All that changes when stranger calls
from Baltimore to tell her that Sean’s ex-girlfriend, Denise, has been shot in
the leg and hospitalised; someone has to come and look after her nine-year-old
daughter, Cheryl and her perky pet dog called Airplane. The neighbour has
assumed, Willa must be the child’s grandmother, because her number is scribbled
by the phone in Denise’s house.
Even though she does not know Denise,
and it is not really her problem, Willa decides to fly out to Baltimore to
help, accompanied by her grumpy Peter, who believes she is incapable of doing
anything on her own, a misconception Willa never dispels.
When they arrive at the home of Denise,
Willa notices the “meagerness” of the young woman’s existence. She is a loving,
if somewhat negligent mother, and Cheryl is amazingly self-sufficient for one
so young. Willa immediately takes to the child, and Cheryl latches on to the
older woman like a drowning person to a life raft. As Peter sulks around, Willa
and Cheryl watch trashy television (Space Junk!) and cook together.
The neighbourhood is made up of a bunch
of quirky—and as one of them notes—single people, who drop by to help when they
can. The couple of days stretch to weeks—even after Denise is discharged from
the hospital, Willa decides she needs help and cannot be abandoned. The
coldness of Sean who lives in the same city and has no time to meet his mother,
is contrasted with the dysfunctional but cheerful community that surrounds
Denise and Cheryl. Willa is so comfortable in the guest room of the
small house, and enjoys her role as grandmother so much that she is reluctant
to leave, even after Peter returns home in a huff. She feels loved and needed
by Cheryl, while her life with Peter in arid Arizona is symbolized
by a giant saguaro cactus.
In spite of the joy and tenderness of
the new relationships Willa forms, there is a little cliché there—that a
woman’s life is not complete till she feels “useful.” At some point,
Cheryl becomes the focus of the story—the too-mature-for-her-age, plump girl,
with a crush on a leather-clad neighbour, Sergio, she calls Sir Joe—and she
makes the implausibility of the story worth glossing over. In any case, Anne
Tyler’s writing is always elegant enough to enjoy.
Clock Dance
By Anne Tyler
Publisher: Knopf
Pages: 292
