Clock\u00a0Dance\u00a0<\/em>stands up as an excellent example of her work. Willa Drake leads a life common for women in the mid 20th century, quitting college to get married and have a family, giving up the possibility of being the linguist she showed talent for. She does finish the degree, but ends up teaching public school. She loses one husband but picks up another one much like the other one. Like a gifted child, she knows what everyone \u2013 except herself \u2013 wants, and she gives it to them.<\/p>\nUntil the phone rings one day. It\u2019s a desperate neighbor of her son\u2019s ex-girlfriend, calling because the girlfriend has been shot, and the woman can\u2019t care for the daughter, she found this number on the wall, could Willa come help?\u00a0 On a whim, she does.<\/p>\n
That puts Willa\u00a0on a plane to Baltimore, familiar Tyler territory, and on a path to what the book jacket describes as \u201cself-discovery.\u201d\u00a0 Tyler drops her into a familiar cast of characters, both vivid, endearing, and so recognizable\u2014the gangly kid down the street in the stocking cap, the retired doctor who still sees patients at home but keeps losing his cat, the precocious daughter who mothers her mother more than her mother mothers her. There\u2019s nothing not to appreciate, if not like, about the neighborhood. The only characters not sympathetic here are the males, who fit the definition of straw men if ever there were any in a novel. Not perversely patriarchal, they nevertheless represent the forces that have dominated Willa\u2019s life. Therefore, it is no surprise when Willa\u2019s \u201cself-discovery\u201d leads to a change in her life, as she decides to\u00a0dance through the hours, not move quietly through them.<\/p>\n
That lack of suspense brings up an argument sometimes put forth about Tyler\u2019s work \u2014 it\u2019s good, not great. The focus on the ordinary leaves her open to the pedestrian argument, and, indeed, she gives her bourgeois audience what they want. As Jean-Paul Sartre said about the French bourgeois theater, the bourgeoisie pays to see themselves on the stage. As described before, she does that well, and the bourgeoisie (including my editor) loves Tyler. Unfortunately, Sartre\u2019s other lament about the bourgeois theater applies here\u2014it\u2019s like watching an arrow hit a target you know it was headed for all the while.<\/p>\n
Although Willa changes, it\u2019s not a surprise, or transformation. If that is not a requirement in your reading,\u00a0Clock\u00a0Dance\u00a0<\/em>should satisfy you. No one writes an Anne Tyler novel better than Anne Tyler. Only time will tell if her work endures.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I love most of Anne Tyler’s novels, but Bob Moyer thinks her books appeal to the bourgeoisie. He even singles me, his editor, out as part of that bourgeois fan club. My response would be, so what? I like Anne Tyler’s writing because yes, she writes about ordinary people, and in the end, there may […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[278,1061],"class_list":["post-2374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literary-fiction","category-uncategorized","tag-anne-tyler","tag-clock-dance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2374"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2377,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374\/revisions\/2377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a>It\u2019s not hard to understand why Anne Tyler\u2019s books are so popular. Her writing reads effortlessly, which suggests she puts a lot of effort into making it that way. She also writes with great empathy and detail about ordinary people doing ordinary things, and that\u2019s extraordinary<\/p>\n