Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Clock Dance



 The Accidental Grandmother

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

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