book review for french braid

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Anne Tyler’s ‘French Braid’ is entirely familiar, and that’s just perfect

Everything about Anne Tyler’s 24th novel, “French Braid,” is immediately recognizable to her fans. The story offers such a complete checklist of the author’s usual motifs and themes that it could serve as the Guidebook to Anne Tyler in the Wild. The insular Baltimore family, the quirky occupations, the special foods — they all move across these pages as predictably as the phases of the moon.

There are times when such familiarity might feel tiresome. But we’re not in one of those times. Indeed, given today’s slate of horror and chaos, the rich melody of “French Braid” offers the comfort of a beloved hymn. It doesn’t even matter if you believe in the sanctity of family life; the sound alone brings solace.

The Garretts are a classic Tyler tribe: responsible, middle-class, kind but flinty. Robin and Mercy have inherited the family plumbing supply store. They’re the parents of three blue-eyed children: two teenage daughters — one responsible, one boy-crazy — and a 7-year-old son who’s adorably serious and “often seemed weirdly smart about people.”

We meet the Garretts in 1959 when Robin finally takes his family on their first vacation, an outing long postponed by his reluctance to leave the store in anyone else’s hands. Convinced they can’t go far or afford much, Robin settles on a week at a rustic cabin near Deep Creek Lake. “Not actually on the waterfront,” Tyler adds, “because Robin said that was too pricey, but close enough; close enough.” Such deceptively casual asides have endeared Tyler to readers for more than half a century. In novel after novel, she catches the mingled strains of affection and exasperation that tie a family together, the love that persists somewhere between laughing and sighing.

As the Garretts’ week in the woods plays out, Tyler follows each member of the family. With simple meals, card games and afternoons at the lake, this is a study in the subterranean movements of idleness. The children notice their father “is not a born vacationer.” Tyler explains, “There was something effortful about him.” Mercy, meanwhile, gets lost in her amateur painting. David, the Garretts’ youngest child, would rather not learn to swim, thank you very much, but he seems perfectly happy playing with his plastic GIs. And their younger daughter, 15-year-old Lily, dashes off every day with a handsome 21-year-old man who’s vacationing nearby. Her expectations of being proposed to — in a gazebo! — strike everyone in the family as charmingly ridiculous.

The days play out as placidly as the surface of Deep Creek Lake — and with the same murky depths lurking beneath. Only little David seems to take the risk of drowning seriously. How is it that Lily’s parents don’t suspect what’s happening between her and the man she’s disappearing with every morning? Alice, the eldest child, has “the sudden peculiar feeling that she had somehow become older than her mother — her dainty little mother drifting in space.” Then in a flash, like light hitting a knife blade in a crowd, she thinks, “Everybody was separate. Even her father, a few yards away from her, was swimming now toward shore. A passerby would never guess the Garretts even knew each other. They looked so scattered, and so lonesome.”

10 books to read in March

With exquisite subtlety, this early chapter lays down the psychological trajectories of several storylines that develop throughout “French Braid.” It’s also a reminder that. although Tyler has devoted her life to novels, she commands all the tools of a brilliant short story writer.

Now 80 years old, Tyler can move freely up and down the scale of ages with complete authority, capturing the patient spirit of a retiree, the buoyant expectation of a second-grader or the unstable realm of naivete and dread where teenagers hang out. Every time we meet the Garretts in a new chapter, about 10 years have passed. The effect is neither jarring nor schematic, more like the gentle turning of leaves in a photo album. Children go off to college, graduates get married, spouses have babies — a perfectly natural turn of events, anchored by captivating snapshots of a growing family.

Seeing the Garretts every decade creates a structure that, like Tyler’s whole body of work, offers recurring moments of recognition punctuated by surprise. Over the years, Robin and Mercy’s marriage strains almost to the point of breaking, but their devotion to one another has a kind of elasticity that’s baffling to their children who are unacquainted with the tensile strength of alloyed love. “Marriages have stages. They have incarnations, almost,” Mercy explains. “You can be in a good marriage and you can be in a bad marriage, and they can both be the same one but just at different times.” The slow-flashing strobe light of this novel makes that clear.

Anne Tyler loathes Shakespeare. So she decided to rewrite one of his plays.

Meanwhile, the siblings drift into their disparate personalities, adult exaggerations of their childhood anxieties and desires. If what ties these people together sometimes feels constraining, it’s also lovely — a French braid that leaves an indelible impression on the strands of their lives. “That’s how families work,” David realizes as an adult. “You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever.”

Late in the novel, David’s wife reminds him: “This is what families do for each other — hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses.”

“And little cruelties,” David adds.

Who captures that poignant paradox so well as Anne Tyler, our patron saint of the unremarked outlandishness of ordinary life?

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts the Book Report for CBS “Sunday Morning.”

French Braid

By Anne Tyler

Knopf. 244 pp. $27

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By Jennifer Haigh

Published March 20, 2022 Updated March 21, 2022

FRENCH BRAID By Anne Tyler

In the opening pages of “French Braid,” a Baltimore college student spots a familiar-looking man in a train station. She suspects — but isn’t sure — that he is her first cousin Nicholas. Her uncertainty shocks her traveling companion — the boyfriend whose own close-knit family she has just met.

The roots of this familial distance are the central concern of “French Braid,” the 24th novel by the beloved Baltimore novelist Anne Tyler. Spanning 60 years and multiple generations, it offers a diffuse, affectionate portrait of the Garretts, a loving but aloof family in which nearly everything is left unsaid.

Our first glimpse of the Garrett clan comes in 1959, as the cousins’ grandparents, Robin and Mercy, take a rare family vacation with their children. Tyler proceeds to check in on them once every decade or so, always at some moment of transition. What emerges is a kind of forensic examination of Garrett family relations, a look at how their elliptical style of interaction came to be.

Tyler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, is at heart a 20th-century realist, a younger contemporary of John Updike , Richard Yates and Alice Munro . Like them, she is interested in the tension between freedom and intimacy, personal fulfillment and the demands of family life. Mercy Garrett is a frustrated artist who, after a year and a half of art school in Baltimore, shelved her dream of studying in Paris, married decent, reliable Robin and raised three children. Only after her youngest leaves for college do her aspirations resurface. Mercy rents a painting studio a few blocks away and quietly “leaves” Robin by gradually moving her possessions there. It’s a remarkable development, not least because it takes the rest of the family quite a while to catch on.

In fact, Mercy never admits that she and Robin have separated, not even to their children. Her new independence is too fragile. When her daughter confesses that her own marriage is on the rocks, Mercy panics: “She was ashamed to admit that her main concern was how to dissuade Lily from moving into the studio.” Mercy manages to dodge that bullet, only to get stuck taking care of her landlord’s cat. When he asks her to keep the cat permanently, she can’t bring herself to say no. She simply dumps it at an animal shelter when the landlord leaves town.

Mercy’s furtiveness — call it an extreme aversion to confrontation — is echoed across the generations. When her son, David, suddenly marries a colleague at the school where he teaches, he tells his family after the fact. His sister Lily conceals her third marriage from her own children. Eddie, a Garrett grandson, never gets around to telling the family he is gay.

For Tyler fans, this is familiar territory: the quotidian frictions and rewards of family life in white, middle-class Baltimore. But while her earlier novels were heavy on domestic details, vividly evoking the texture of daily life, “French Braid” is less fully imagined, the characters less developed. There are simply too many years to cover, too many children and grandchildren to keep track of. The younger Garretts are drawn haphazardly, or not at all.

Five decades into her career, one gets the sense that Tyler is no longer quite so interested in the details. Instead, “French Braid” offers something subtler and finer, the long view on family: what remains years later, when the particulars have been sanded away by time. The tone is wistful, elegiac. Watching his own children grow into adulthood, David experiences an exquisite sense of loss: “It was true that these days there happened to be two very dear grown-ups who were also named Emily and Nicholas, but they weren’t the same people. It was just as if those children had died. He’d been in mourning ever since.”

The novel’s emotional crescendo comes at Robin and Mercy’s 50th-anniversary party. (Twenty years after she moved out, they still haven’t told the kids.) Watching home movies with his disconnected, taciturn brood, Robin reflects: “Had there been some kind of limit, in those days, on how long a scene could last? Each one was so brief. … Pouf! And then goodbye. Goodbye to all of it. … It had flown by way too fast, he thought as the screen went blank. And he didn’t mean only the movie.”

“French Braid” is a novel about what is remembered, what we’re left with when all the choices have been made, the children raised, the dreams realized or abandoned. It is a moving meditation on the passage of time.

The novel ends on a poignant note, as David, now retired, finds himself unexpectedly awash in family intimacy when his son moves in with him during the pandemic. He is startled to recognize Garrett family traits in his 5-year-old grandson. “David’s father had raised his shoulders like that whenever he was intent on some task — a man Benny had never laid eyes on.” It leads him to recall the French braids his daughter wore as a child: “When she undid them, her hair would still be in ripples.”

David tells his wife: “That’s how families work, too. You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever.”

The moment is vintage Tyler: the epiphany that will surprise no one, a clever rephrasing of conventional wisdom that merely affirms what we already believe. It’s why some (mostly male) critics have, over the years, dismissed her work as sentimental — the defining characteristic of the genre known as “women’s fiction.” It’s a publishing euphemism that carries more than a whiff of misogyny, implying that fiction written by and about women is by definition something less than literature — heartwarming rather than cerebral, reassuring rather than challenging. To be sure, over her long career Tyler has occasionally fallen into these traps. (See “ A Patchwork Planet .”) But “French Braid” is the opposite of reassuring. The novel is imbued with an old-school feminism of a kind currently unfashionable. It looks squarely at the consequences of stifled female ambition — to the woman herself, and to those in her orbit.

For all its charm, “French Braid” is a quietly subversive novel, tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging. Contrary to the message of a thousand self-help books, Mercy’s efforts to begin a career at midlife are fruitless. She advertises her services in neighborhood grocery stores, on laundromat bulletin boards: “Let a Professional Artist Paint Your House’s Portrait.” After decades as a housewife, domestic life is her only subject.

In mourning the lost possibilities of Mercy’s life, Tyler takes aim at a sentimental trope deeply embedded in American culture. The feminist movement notwithstanding, popular culture (not to mention “women’s fiction”) still clings to the notion of motherhood as the ultimate emotional fulfillment, the great and crowning satisfaction of a woman’s life. For Mercy Garrett, that simply isn’t the case.

Jennifer Haigh’s sixth novel, “Mercy Street,” was published in February.

FRENCH BRAID By Anne Tyler 256 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.

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French Braid by Anne Tyler review: a quietly radical story

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I’ve been Anne Tyler -ed. After finishing French Braid, the 24 th novel from the formidable American novelist, I was going about my life thinking nothing particularly radical had happened to me. And then I thought about it, and I thought about it some more, and I realised – boom – she really is a master.

The novel introduces us to the Garretts, an unremarkable family from Baltimore. We begin in 2010, when granddaughter Serena spots her cousin in a train station; her boyfriend is bemused at the fact she’s hesitant about saying hello to him. “Oh, what makes a family not work?” she wonders. The question is like a prayer that hangs over the book. Nothing deeply traumatic happens in this family –in fact, it’s the nothingness that conjures a kind of unshiftable cloud of pain and loss. The Garretts are a family that don’t really know each other, nor what to say to one another.

The action spins back to 1959, and we meet Robin and Mercy Garrett. He has taken over the running of a hardware shop that ran in Mercy’s family; she has parked her painterly ambitions in order to be a housewife and a mother. They are embarking on their first proper holiday with their three children, heading for Deep Creek Lake and stoically determined to enjoy themselves. While there, it’s as though they are individuals unconnected with one another: Mercy wants to get on with her watercolours, while Robin wades into the lake and has blokey chats with a new friend he’s made. Their eldest, Alice, takes charge of the cooking; Lily, the middle child, spends most of it off necking with a boy called Trent; and young David, age seven, cautiously avoids getting into the water until his dad forces him into it.

We jump ahead in time with each chapter, observing how the family dynamic has shaped each of them. Alice becomes prissy and domineering and Lily is flaky and unmoored, while David, never losing the sense that his dad dislikes him, keeps his family at arm’s length. Tyler’s set-pieces – here largely conceived as awkward family get-togethers – seem undramatic, but her rhythms are masterly. In one, David brings home his new partner Greta and her young daughter; he doesn’t explain that they are in a relationship, and, like rabbits trapped in headlights, no one asks. Conversations start then short circuit, sputter back into life and then get stuck again.

Perhaps most extraordinary is when Mercy moves out of the family home, one laundry bag at a time, and eventually starts living full-time in her studio and trying to make a living as a painter. It would upset Robin if she left him, so she never says that she has – and no one in the family ever admits it either. It’s another of Tyler’s extraordinarily unshowy but devastating moments of indicating a family that will do strange things out of love for one another.

It’s the idea of family itself, something that has always provided such rich material for Tyler, which seems to weigh down so heavily on the Garretts. Early on, Serena becomes irritated and defensive after meeting her new boyfriend’s welcoming family. “The trouble with wide-open families was, there was something very narrow about their attitude to not-open families,” she thinks. It’s as thought the Garretts can sense that being a family doesn’t come quite naturally to them, and end up crushed by the expectation of it as a concept.

But in each of these chapters comes a quiet moment of emotional truth – a grandmother encouraging her granddaughter’s curiosity about art, or a usually reticent brother’s unfiltered outpouring of love for his new wife – that catches us the reader off guard as much as it does the characters. Sentences appear that seem simple and then suddenly break your heart, such as Mercy’s reflection on her now-grown family: “It all happened so fast, she thought, even though it had seemed endless at the time.” Like I said... I’ve been Anne Tyler-ed.

French Tyler by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus, £16.99)

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

FRENCH BRAID

by Anne Tyler ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 22, 2022

More lovely work from Tyler, still vital and creative at 80.

In her 24th novel, Tyler once again unravels the tangled threads of family life.

This familiar subject always seems fresh in her hands because Tyler draws her characters and their interactions in such specific and revealing detail. Robin and Mercy Garrett and their three children seem oddly distanced from each other when we meet them during a 1959 summer vacation. Robin talks a lot about what everything costs, and Mercy is frequently absent painting the local landscape. Fifteen-year-old Lily is also not around much; deprived of her Baltimore boyfriend, she’s taken up with an older boy who bossy, judgmental older sister Alice is pleased to opine is only using her. Seven-year-old David rejects Robin’s attempts to get him in the water in favor of inventing elaborate storylines for the plastic GIs he’s recast as veterinarians. As usual, Tyler deftly sets the scene and broadly outlines characters who will change and deepen over time as the Garretts traverse 60 years; individual chapters offer the perspective of each parent and sibling (plus three members of the third generation). We need to get inside their heads, because the Garretts seldom discuss what’s really on their minds, the primary example being the fact that once David goes to college, Mercy gets a studio and eventually stops living with Robin altogether. All the children know, but since she appears for family gatherings—including a weird but moving surprise 50th anniversary party Robin throws—no one ever mentions it. Tyler gives the final word to David, who, like his mother, has maintained tenuous family ties while deliberately keeping his distance. Families are like the French braids that left their daughter’s hair in waves even after she undid them, he tells his wife: “You’re never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever.” It’s a characteristically homely, resonant metaphor from a writer who understands that the domestic world can contain the universe.

Pub Date: March 22, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-32109-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

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by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 2024

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024

ISBN: 9780374602635

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

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Review: 'French Braid,' by Anne Tyler

FICTION: In her 24th novel, Anne Tyler captures the avoidances and silences of family life.

By Laurie Hertzel

"French Braid," Anne Tyler's 24th novel, spans three generations of the Garrett family of Baltimore. At its heart are Robin and Mercy Garrett, married in the 1950s, tacitly separated 20 years later.

Robin is a plumber and Mercy is first a housewife and mother, and then an artist. She paints portraits of people's homes, focusing on one modest detail — a doorstop, a newel post, or the fringed trim of a curtain. "Am I missing something? she thought every now and then. Am I overlooking something?" It's a perfect Anne Tyler metaphor.

Once David, their youngest, heads off to college, Mercy quietly moves into her studio a few miles from home.

She plans the move carefully, avoiding confrontation. She packs lightly. "Not all her clothes. Oh, no. To look in her bureau drawers ... you would never suppose anything was missing."

Gradually, Mercy begins spending occasional nights at her studio until eventually she is there full time. She never discusses any of this with her husband. He never asks.

Life is easier with no confrontation, no arguing. The surface remains smooth, the marriage endures.

Families, as Tyler has shown so brilliantly over her long career — she is 80 now — are private, convoluted things, twisted and knotted together over generations like a braid. And not even a simple three-strand braid; more like a complicated French braid, one that takes in more and more strands as it progresses.

Behaviors and attitudes from one generation are braided into the next, and so the Garrett children and grandchildren absorb their parents' need for avoidance. "Oh, the lengths this family would go to so as not to spoil the picture of how things were supposed to be!" Tyler writes.

It is lines like that one — seemingly tossed off by the omniscient narrator, a great skill of Tyler's — that bring heft to this largely plotless book. "French Braid" is filled with piercing observation.

Robin and Mercy's children grow up wary. It's easier, David figures, to avoid the family than to confront them, and so, like his mother, he leaves without ever saying he is going. He spends college summers away from home; he gets married without telling a soul. He just — drifts away. Like so many Tyler characters, he is active through passivity.

The whole complicated arrangement of keeping secrets and not asking questions filters down to Mercy and Robin's grandchildren. Their grandson Eddie doesn't tell anyone he's in a romantic relationship with his longtime partner Claude, so Eddie's aunt does her frantic best to pretend to be in the dark.

"Oh, babe," Claude finally tells Eddie. "She knows. She knew all along."

Late in the novel, Robin tells himself that the greatest accomplishment of his life was that "not a single one of his children guessed that Mercy wasn't living at home anymore."

Or course, earlier, their son-in-law had noted, "It was bizarre ... how something so obvious was never, ever talked about."

Without trust, without confidences, family members unbraid themselves from each other and drift apart. But the ties are not so easily undone, and the effects of family are lasting. "You think you're free of them," David notes, "but you're never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever."

Laurie Hertzel is the senior editor for books at the Star Tribune.

French Braid By: Anne Tyler. Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 244 pages, $27.

about the writer

Laurie hertzel.

Freelance writer and former Star Tribune books editor Laurie Hertzel is at [email protected].

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Reading Matters

Book reviews of mainly modern & contemporary fiction

‘French Braid’ by Anne Tyler

Fiction – paperback; Chatto & Windus; 256 pages; 2022. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Sometimes a novel just strikes the right mood. You pick it up, start reading and become so immersed in the story you lose all sense of time. Before you know it, you’ve read half the book — or at least made substantial inroads.

This is how I felt when I read Anne Tyler’s latest novel, French Braid .

I am a long-time Anne Tyler fan so it’s no surprise I would like this book, but I reckon it’s the best one she’s written since 1982’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant , my favourite Tyler novel. That’s probably because it shares similar traits in terms of its focus on a dysfunctional family and the way chance events shape people’s lives and how sibling relationships are dictated by power dynamics beyond their control.

One family’s story

French Braid charts the history of the Garrett family over several decades — from 1959 through to 2020 — and features all the quintessential trademarks of Tyler’s work: a tapestry of complex family dynamics, a cast of quirky but believable characters, and a Baltimore setting.

There’s no real plot; the character-driven narrative moves ahead in roughly ten-year increments and each chapter is written (in the third person) from the perspective of a particular family member. This allows the reader to get to know the family relatively well, to understand the events that have shaped each person and given rise to certain misunderstandings or lessons or viewpoints.

We witness children growing older, moving out of home, finding partners of their own and having children. The passing of time is marked by graduations, family gatherings, weddings and celebratory dinners and occasions.

It is, at times, poignant and heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny.

A family holiday sets the tone

The family is centred around Robin and Mercy, who get married in 1940, and their children Alice, Lily and David, whose ties and loyalties are tested and divided as they grow up to become adults with lives and families of their own.

A rare family holiday in 1959, when the girls are teens and David is a seven-year-old, underpins the entire family history and sets the tone for everything that follows. What unfolds on that lake in Maryland has long-lasting repercussions. David, in particular, is scarred by Robin’s heavy-handed attempts to force him to go swimming when he’d prefer to play quietly with his toys.

As the years slide by, the Garrett’s marriage comes under strain, not least because Mercy wants the freedom to pursue her ambitions to be a painter. She begins to spend more and more time at the studio she rents nearby, slowly moving her belongings there and staying overnight. Her adult children are under the impression she’s moved out of the family home, but it’s a subject that can’t be broached with their father, who remains devoted to his wife.

It’s the things left unsaid, the uncomfortable truths that remain hidden, which allows the family to muddle on without self-imploding. David’s wife puts it succinctly like this:

This is what families do for each other — hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses.

French Braid is completely immersive as we follow the strands of the Garrett’s disparate lives across three generations. It’s tender, wise, knowing and funny. I loved it.

Published by kimbofo

I am a book obsessive who has been charting my reading life online since the early 2000s. View all posts by kimbofo

23 thoughts on “‘French Braid’ by Anne Tyler”

Great review, Kim. I finished reading it a couple of nights ago and I agree that it is her best one for a while (since maybe The Amateur Marriage). I didn’t have high hopes based on the prologue with Serena and her college boyfriend at the station – here we go again, I thought, Tyler attempting to write a younger contemporary character and failing once more (see The Beginner’s Goodbye and Redhead by the Side of the Road) but once she takes you back to the 50s she’s on surer footing and the rest of the novel just sings. Also, not having a great deal of time to read at the moment, I really appreciated the fact that the book was structured more like a collection of linked short stories!

Thanks, David, and yes, good point about it reading like a collection of short stories. That wasn’t something that occurred to me until I was nearing the end of the book, but it’s a good way to describe the structure. I read this back in April but never got to write my review as I was interviewing for a new job and just didn’t have the time. Writing it today, I had fun rereading sections to refresh my memory. There are actually some really funny scenes in this book!

I like the idea of the perspective shifts since I’m sure they give one each person’s view on past and current occurrences

Yes, the perspective shifts allow you to see where misunderstandings have occurred while also showing you how different people view the same incident or event in different ways.

Like Liked by 1 person

Right. Onto the list it goes. Thanks.

It would be hard to go wrong with this one, I think.

I really enjoyed the couple of Tyler’s I read for Liz’s readalong last year and this sounds great too.

It’s a fun read, Cathy. She really understands the complexities of family life and what happens to siblings as they grow up and then forge successful lives of their own. Yet when they get back together for family occasions all the old rivalries and anxieties come to the fore, almost as if they have reverted back to their much younger selves.

What a lovely review – I really enjoyed this, too (apart from Mercy’s unforgiveable act) but found it really quite emotional and poignant, more than most of the others.

Is “Mercy’s unforgivable act” the cat? If so, I’m with you on that!

Oh god, the cat and the shenanigans around looking after it.

It is emotional and poignant but it’s also very funny in places. Mercy’s business idea and the way that certain clients are upset by the paintings she does for them was just hilarious!

I’m glad to hear this is such a good one. I have it in my stack.

You are in for a treat! The first chapter is a bit disorientating because it’s not in chronological order, but when the narrative spools back to 1959 it really hits its stride.

I think I can handle that.

Hi Kim – I’m also a long time Tyler fan and felt the same way from the first page of this book. She captures people so well that you feel as if you’ve caught up with a relative who has filled you in on people you know! Easy to read because it is so believable.

She knows people so well but especially the things that are said to you as a child or minor incidences that happen which end up shaping your whole life.

So glad you agree that this was a quintessential Tyler. I adored it too and like you devoured it in a couple of sittings.

Great review by the way – it brought back all the pleasure I had in reading the book.

Thanks, Brona. I read it a couple of months ago but was interviewing for a job so my energies got diverted elsewhere. Writing this today brought back all the pleasure of reading the book, too.

I generally enjoy a Tyler book without paying them too much attention listening as I work. I remember not liking Homesick Restaurant from before Liz Dexter had me paying Tyler some attention. David’s comment, that Tyler is more comfortable with the 1950s resonates though. I’ll keep an eye out for this one at the library.

Yes, she’s especially good at 50s and 60s, which is her era I guess. I’d offer you my copy but it’s already been promised to my sister who is coming over from Melbourne for a long weekend visit next weekend.

Yes, that’s Tyler! Even her lesser books are still good reads!

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Book Summary and Reviews of French Braid by Anne Tyler

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French Braid

by Anne Tyler

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From the beloved best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author - a funny, joyful, brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one Baltimore family's foibles, from a boyfriend with a red Chevy in the 1950s up to a longed-for reunion with a grandchild in our pandemic present.

The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation. Full of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close—yet how unknowable—every family is to itself. First published March 2022. Paperback reprint Feb 2023

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

Revisit the novel's first chapter, now that you know the full story. What did you originally predict for Serena? What were your notions about why her family was so disconnected?
Which images stand out most clearly to you from the Garretts' summer vacation? What lifelong pursuits were set in motion for Alice, Lily, and David during their time at the lakeside cabin? Share your defining memories from a childhood trip.
How did your perceptions of Mercy and Robin shift as the details of their marriage unfolded? Though Robin's proposal included the plea, "If you can imagine us ever, ever divorcing, then I don't want you to accept" (page 146), was there ever a time when he felt truly secure with Mercy, and with his in-laws?
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Reader reviews.

"Anne Tyler's French Braid is entirely familiar, and that's just perfect... Late in the novel, David's wife reminds him: "This is what families do for each other — hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions. Little kindnesses." "And little cruelties," David adds. Who captures that poignant paradox so well as Anne Tyler, our patron saint of the unremarked outlandishness of ordinary life?" - Ron Charles, The Washington Post " French Braid is a novel about what is remembered, what we're left with when all the choices have been made, the children raised, the dreams realized or abandoned. It is a moving meditation on the passage of time...For all its charm, it is a quietly subversive novel, tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging." - Jennifer Haigh, New York Times "[A]ny Tyler book is a gift. Funny, poignant, generous, not shying away from death and disappointment but never doomy or overwrought, it suggests there's always new light to be shed, whatever the situation, with just another turn of the prism." - Anthony Cummins, The Guardian "Lushly imagined, psychologically intricate, virtually inhalable...At every leap, Tyler balances gracefully between tenderness and piquant humor, her insights into human nature luminous. Tyler is a phenomenon, each of her novels feels fresh and incisive, and this charming family tale will be honey for her fans." - Booklist (starred review) "Tyler returns with a dry and well-crafted look at a family that inexplicably comes apart over several decades...Tyler's focus on character development proves fruitful; a reunion organized by the wistful Robin in the '90s is particularly affecting, as is a coda with David during the Covid-19 pandemic. As always, Tyler offers both comfort and surprise." - Publishers Weekly "Tyler draws her characters and their interactions in such specific and revealing detail...More lovely work from Tyler, still vital and creative at 80." - Kirkus Review

Author Information

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Anne Tyler Author Biography

Photo: Diana Walker

Anne Tyler's 50 Year Writing Career

In March 2013, Anne Tyler announced the title of her upcoming novel in an interview with the BBC. She also noted that she didn't want to finish another novel - not even this one. She described the book as a "sprawling family saga," which starts with the present generation and then moves back, one generation at a time. Fortunately, she realized she was only interested in three generations. Before this revelation, she figured A Spool of Blue Thread could go on long enough that she might die before its publication! That way she wouldn't have the hassle of the editing, polishing, promoting and worrying if the book was any good or not. This sounds like the pressure of thinking up something new and original, combined with her obvious penchant for ...

... Full Biography Author Interview

Other books by Anne Tyler at BookBrowse

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Theresa Smith Writes

Delighting in all things bookish, book review: french braid by anne tyler, about the book:.

The major new novel from the beloved prize-winning author — a brilliantly perceptive, painfully true, and funny journey deep into one family’s foibles, from the 1950s right up to the changed world of today.

When the kids are grown and Mercy Garrett gradually moves herself out of the family home, everyone is determined not to notice.

Over at her studio, she wants space and silence. She won’t allow any family clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond.

Yet it is a clutter of untidy moments that forms the Garretts’ family life over the decades, whether that’s a painstaking Easter lunch or giving a child a ride, a fateful train journey or an unexpected homecoming.

And it all begins in 1959, with a family holiday to a cabin by a lake. It’s the only one the Garretts will ever take, but its effects will ripple through the generations.

Published by Penguin Random House Australia – Chatto & Windus

Released 29 th March 2022

My Thoughts:

Anne Tyler. What is there to even say? There is truly no other author out there like her. I always feel a bit useless writing a review on an Anne Tyler novel, to be honest, because I always love them, and the nature of her writing gives little room for commentary. As with all her previous novels, French Braid has no plot to speak of, but is instead a deep character study of the members of the Garrett family through the generations. This is of course what I love most about Anne Tyler – that she can pull us into the everyday and hold us so entirely captivated for the duration. Because as with all her families, there is much to recognise within, as well as much to contemplate and think over.

‘Oh, the lengths this family would go to so as not to spoil the picture of how things were supposed to be!’

The title of this novel bears a great deal of significance and is explained right before it ends. I don’t think it’s a spoiler if I elaborate on it here, and really, it explains so much about the novel and will give you an insight into what it’s about. One of the characters likens family to the unravelling of a French braid. How the braid leaves the hair rippled for a long time after. He points out that this is similar to how families work, tightly woven for a period and then once unravelled, the ripples remain, crimped in forever. I absolutely love that. I come from a big family, a vast number of cousins, some of which I am in contact with, none of which I actually ever see, due to distance mostly. But the ripples are still there, and we are still crimped together by our shared experiences, even if we probably do all view them differently from each other.

If you’re a fan of Anne Tyler, this novel will not disappoint. If you’ve never read her before (people like this exist?) then consider this your starting place. She is, as ever, stunning, and delivers another brilliant read.

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

French Braid: A Novel

By Anne Tyler
Reviewed by Jennifer Bort Yacovissi
April 4, 2022

The literary patron saint of Baltimore serves up her signature affectionate take on family dysfunction.

There is a phenomenon at work when the quietest possible story with the sparest of plots still compels a reader to sit for hours and let the tale unspool in its own time, content to see where it will go next — even when it’s clear the path is through familiar territory.

Ah, we must be reading Anne Tyler.

French Braid is Tyler’s 24th novel, and that body of work forms a unified whole of style, place, and character. It is long since readers have understood her universe and eagerly return to it with each new release. Tyler offers literary comfort food without apology; as she noted in a 2015 interview, a reader looks to Philip Roth for “piss and vinegar” and to her for “milk and cookies.”

Still, there’s a perpetual edge to her stories. In Tyler’s fictional families, if anyone actually serves milk and cookies, there’s something vaguely discomfiting about it.

It strikes me that Tyler and Ann Patchett use similar approaches to their work. Patchett’s usual leaping-off point takes a group of strangers and throws them together into an unusual situation to see what happens. Tyler takes a family in situ and throws its members at one another to reveal that they are indeed strangers, too — the question is whether any of them will come to recognize the others as individuals and not simply as caricatures permanently stamped with their assigned roles within the domestic hierarchy.

The idea of family as a collection of strangers locked in predetermined roles is front and center in French Braid , with the lines marked from the outset. We’re introduced to the Garretts obliquely, when one of the cousins, Serena, thinks she recognizes another cousin, Nicholas, standing nearby in Philadelphia’s Penn Station. Serena’s boyfriend, James, finds it amusingly odd that she’s not sure and inexplicable that members of a relatively small family don’t seem to know each other.

When Serena and Nicholas finally chat, Nicholas can’t remember which of his two aunts, Alice or Lily, is Serena’s mother, and asks, “I have a cousin named Candle?” James teases Serena that she describes the geographical distance separating the three Garrett siblings — Alice in Baltimore County, Lily in Baltimore City, and David in Philly — as vast, unbridgeable spaces.

The story rolls on to illuminate that it’s not the geography that is unbridgeable.

It has been observed that the passage of time provides the plot of Anne Tyler novels; here, it is a combination of passing time and successive points of view. From Serena’s chance meeting with Nicholas in 2010, the author whisks us back to 1959, the year of the lone Garrett family vacation.

Robin Garrett is proprietor of his late father-in-law’s plumbing-supply company and has never been able to step away from the business long enough to take wife Mercy and their three children on a vacation. It’s only now that Alice is 17 and Lily 15 that Mercy is finally able to prevail on him to spend a week at Maryland’s Deep Creek Lake. David, at 7, is the only one in the target demographic of those likely to be excited at the prospect.

In this foundational chapter, eldest child Alice is our guide into the roots of the Garretts’ dysfunction — quotidian, familiar dysfunction with a lowercase “d,” arising at least partly from all the things we cannot, will not, say to each other. Mercy is vague in her commitment to fulfilling her maternal duties, preferring to spend time sketching and painting; Alice long ago stepped into the breach:

“Alice often liked to imagine that a book was being written about her life. A narrator with an authoritative male voice was describing her every act. ‘Alice sighed’ was a frequent observation.”

When, at the lake, Lily immediately falls in with a much older boy with a car and a rich family, Alice is desperate for her parents to inhabit their given roles as gatekeepers. Instead, Robin’s acquaintance with another father awakens his latent paternal instinct to bully a reluctant David into proving his 7-year-old manliness, in this case by getting into the water.

Ah, the fond, lifelong memories formed on family vacations!

It’s good that we spend time with Alice early, when we can sympathize with her circumstance, before she hardens into a judgmental scold and gossip. Her view of her family — Lily as petulant and irresponsible, Mercy as cheerfully, irritatingly inattentive — comes to color ours, so that we join in the judgment.

We pick up again in 1970: With David off to college, Mercy enacts her plan to move gradually into her rented art studio without ever admitting to Robin that she’s leaving — that she’s left — even after she stops coming back to the house to fix his breakfast or dinner.

Mercy’s gambit is both funny and heartbreaking; we never saw her stealthy, steely resolve coming, but neither did Robin, who is left blindsided and uncomprehending, certain he had been doing all that was expected of him.

Tyler often writes about the corrosive effects of family secrets. The lovely twist in French Braid is that there are none — merely a kindhearted, collaborative ignoring of certain truths. Robin is able to maintain his dignity, sure that none of the children realize Mercy has left, and they allow him his fiction.

In one of the most touching episodes later in the novel, the now elderly Lily accidentally meets her nephew Eddie’s live-in boyfriend, Claude, whom Eddie is desperate to keep hidden. When Claude tells him, “Oh, babe. She knows…She knew all along,” Eddie finally realizes his entire family has always known he is gay without ever offering comment or critique.

French Braid brings us all the way into the pandemic and eventually into David’s point of view. Through the years, he has presented a frustrating mystery to his parents and sisters as to why he holds himself at such a remove from the rest of the Garretts.

The women share a quiet, collective blaming of David’s older wife, Greta, whom they see as cold and overly direct, while Robin is certain it’s because he made David work “the summer of the plumber” before he started college. They cast about for specific reasons, but it’s a misguided search.

These are simply the vicissitudes of family; they may think David is absent, but for him, his family is ever-present. And as we watch David and Greta host their son and grandson through a covid summer, we realize how fully, beautifully functional this family has become.

Jennifer Bort Yacovissi’s debut novel, Up the Hill to Home , tells the story of four generations of a family in Washington, DC, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. Her short fiction has appeared in Gargoyle and Pen-in-Hand. Jenny reviews regularly for the Independent and serves on its board of directors as president. She has served as chair or program director of the Washington Writers Conference since 2017, and for several recent years was president of the Annapolis chapter of the Maryland Writers’ Association. Stop by Jenny’s website for a collection of her reviews and columns, and follow her on Twitter at @jbyacovissi.

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Author Interviews

Author anne tyler on writing her 24th novel and why she writes about families.

Mary Louise Kelly

Elena Burnett

Courtney Dorning

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with writer Anne Tyler about her 24th novel French Braid. Set in Baltimore, the book tracks one family, the Garretts, across decades and generations

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

French Braid

63 pages • 2 hours read

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Summary and Study Guide

Anne Tyler, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer widely considered one of America’s finest authors, released her novel French Braid in 2022. In many ways, the narrative is a return to the themes of several of her previous, highly regarded works. Once again, Tyler focuses on the frayed interpersonal workings of a middle-class Baltimore family over the course of several generations. Hardworking, ambitious plumber Robin Garrett woos beautiful Mercy, winning the girl and soon inheriting her father’s plumbing-supply business. They bring three children into the world—like them, blond, blue-eyed, and smart. In time, they celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. Beneath the storybook veneer of the family, however, the Garretts are disparate people, failing to meet one another’s expectations and never finding the compassionate bond of a happy family. When spouses join the family and grandchildren are born, these unresolved conflicts result in unexpected solutions as various family members try to pursue their dreams yet find themselves inescapably tangled together.

This guide refers to the 2022 Knopf hardcover edition.

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Plot Summary

Two Garrett family members have a chance encounter in March 2010, the chronological setting of Chapter 1. Serena , the younger child of Lily , who is Robin and Mercy’s middle child, waits in the Philadelphia station for the train that will return her and her boyfriend, James, to Baltimore. Serena and James are coming from a brief visit with his large, welcoming family. She reflects that, as a child, she always wanted to be part of a gregarious family. Serena mentions to James that she thinks she sees her cousin Nicholas, the son of her uncle David , but is not certain. James brings Nicholas to her. In their brief conversation, they work out exactly how they are related, then quickly depart for their trains. James expresses amazement that Serena and her cousin know so little about each other. For Serena, the encounter with Nicholas is a stark reminder of the disaffected nature of her family. She suddenly feels uncomfortable with James, realizing she does not fit with families like his.

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Chapter 2 goes back to the summer of 1959 to describe the first and only vacation the Garrett family ever takes. Alice , at 17 the eldest child of Robin and Mercy, drives her mother, her father, 15-year-old Lily, and seven-year-old David to the campground of Deep Creek Lake, a half-day’s journey from Baltimore. Lily pouts all day because she is not with her boyfriend, Jump. Once at their cabin, the family drifts into separate activities, coming together only for meals and occasional trips to the tourist stores in the resort area. Instantly, Lily meets a college student, Trent, with whom she spends virtually every waking moment. Mercy experiences a revival of fascination with painting, affirming her interest in painting interior still lifes over landscapes. Robin spends most of his time standing waist-deep in the lake with a like-minded entrepreneur named Bentley. David sits on the beach inventing stories for his toy men without wading into the water. Alice is concerned about her sister, wondering why Mercy allows Lily such latitude. Mercy discovers that David walked into the lake at his father’s insistence and briefly sank beneath the surface. Robin downplays the incident, but David becomes unwilling to go to the beach. On the final vacation day, Alice and David return from grocery shopping to discover Trent and Lily together in a cabin bedroom. Trent walks out, leaving a disheveled, shamed Lily sitting on the bed. Alice charges after Trent, warning him away from Lily. That evening, Alice and Robin cook supper, though Lily does not come out of the bedroom to eat.

Chapter 3 takes place over the course of a full year, beginning in early September 1970, when Robin and Mercy deliver David to Islington College in Pennsylvania for his freshman year. David relishes this escape from his family, and they will not see him, and only scarcely hear from him, until Christmas. Mercy has an escape on her mind as well. She begins to move her clothing, personal necessities, and art supplies from their house to a rented room above a garage several blocks away that she has turned into her art studio. She transforms the studio into a self-sustaining apartment. Finally, she tells Robin she is devoting herself to painting what she terms house portraits and will spend most of her time, including nights, at the studio. She promises Robin this does not mean she will divorce him. Mercy learns that Lily, who previously eloped with mechanic BJ, has become pregnant by Morris, a former real-estate coworker, also married. Ultimately, Morris leaves his wife and buys a home for himself and Lily. By Thanksgiving, the Garretts welcome him into the family. Alice and her husband, Kevin, have a toddler daughter, Robby. David arrives for three weeks at Christmas. That summer, David travels with a theater group. Mercy spends virtually all her time in the studio.

Chapter 4 jumps to 1982, by which time Lily is the manager of the plumbing-supply company. David, a high-school teacher in Philadelphia, calls Lily to ask if the family might have a special Easter lunch at which he can introduce them to his friend Greta. Since David seldom has any dealings with the Garretts, the family grows excited to see him and curious about why he wants to introduce Greta; this will be the first time he has ever brought a woman to meet his family. Alice wins the fight over where the family will eat, bringing everyone together to the Baltimore suburb where she and Kevin live. David arrives with Greta, who is 10 years older than he, and her tween daughter, Emily. Soon after the meal, David’s troupe departs to see local sites. The family launches into debates about why David remains so distant and how serious his relationship with Greta is. In a thank-you note to Alice, Greta tells her that she and David got married soon after the Easter meal. David’s sudden marriage becomes another source of family discord.

Chapter 5, set in the summer of 1990, centers on Robin’s intention to put together a surprise 50th-wedding anniversary party for Mercy. Desiring a full family gathering, Robin seeks the cooperation of his children. His daughters try to convince him to cancel the party. The family universally fears the event will be a disaster; not only does Mercy dislike surprises but they do not believe Robin can pull it off. All his efforts bear fruit, as everything goes according to plan on the Sunday morning of the party. He lures Mercy home from the studio by calling her and saying David has come home. She stands in stunned silence when she sees everyone in the living room before Greta wishes her a happy anniversary. It had totally escaped Mercy that she and Robin achieved 50 years of marriage, and she accepts the festivities graciously. After everyone leaves, Mercy spends the night with Robin. However, when he asks her to move back home the next morning, she ignores the request.

Set primarily in the summer of 1997, Chapter 6 follows 12-year-old Candle Lainey, the independently minded youngest child of Alice. Candle—whose real name, Kendall, was unpronounceable to her as a child—has had her nascent painting talent affirmed at summer camp. When she learns that her grandmother, Mercy, is a painter, Mercy welcomes her into her studio, giving her projects and advice but primarily giving her the freedom and space to paint. Candle awakens within Mercy’s tutelage, making gains artistically and even more in worldview. Mercy invites Candle to accompany her to New York City to view a new art exhibit by an old friend. The one-day excursion is an awe-filled learning experience for Candle. On the train ride home, Mercy passes away in her sleep. Though well handled by a compassionate conductor, the loss of her mentor, which she gradually comes to understand without being explicitly told, devastates Candle.

Chapter 7 takes place in the summer of 2014. Eddie Lainey, the middle child of Alice and Kevin, has become the manager of the plumbing store. Lily calls to ask if Eddie wants any of her furniture; she is moving to Asheville, North Carolina, to help Serena with her cranky newborn son. This leads to Lily meeting Eddie’s partner, Claude, whom he lives with and has never told his family about. Eddie learns that his entire family has always known he is gay; Eddie feels stunned at the realization that everyone accepts his orientation and preserves his privacy.

The final setting, in Chapter 8, is the Philadelphia home of David and Greta, where their son, Nicholas, and grandson, Benny, retreat to wait out the 2020 pandemic. The couple retrofits their home for the needs of their inventor son and five-year-old grandchild. Quickly, the retired David and Greta acclimate themselves to the new routine. As he relishes the time spent with Nicholas and Benny, a bittersweet recognition grows within David that he and Greta will have to suffer through empty-nest feelings of loss again. The chapter is laden with many ironic references to David’s childhood that cause him to relive often painful memories. He hears from a disapproving Alice that Lily has remarried—a spur-of-the-moment decision—without telling anyone and moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. David confesses to Greta that the old conflicts and bonds from his childhood still format his life and that he believes the same is true for most families.

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10 French Braid Book Club Questions to Discuss

Anne Tyler’s French Braid is a masterful mix of love, ambition, and the complexities of human connection. Through the lens of this Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s signature warmth and wit, we’ll explore the challenges and triumphs of a family spanning generations.

Let’s untangle the complexities of the Garrett family together.

This discussion guide offers a rich exploration of French Braid , inviting you to ponder the impact of ambition, the weight of everyday life, and the enduring power of familial bonds.

Let’s begin.

French Braid Book Club Questions

The chance encounter between Serena and Nicholas at the beginning of the novel shows how disconnected the Garrett family members were from each other, even those who are related. Not keeping in touch with each other proved that they were not well acquainted with what was happening in their respective lives. Discuss how this was purposely done by Anne Taylor to set the stage for the rest of the novel, which delves into the family’s history and explores the reasons for their estrangement.
The vacation at Deep Creek Lake highlights the lack of communication between parents and children, as Robin downplays David’s near-drowning incident. The vacation becomes a turning point in Lily’s life as she meets Trent and falls for him. Do you think this was the exact moment when Alice’s protective instincts kicked in when she realized what was happening and became way more concerned about her sister’s wellbeing?
Mercy’s decision to move to her art studio reflects her desire to pursue her own interests and have her own space. Her family is initially taken aback by her decision, but eventually accept it. Mercy’s dedication to her art is a source of tension between her and Robin, but it also allows her to carve out her own identity and pursue her passion. Discuss Mercy’s ability to have confidence in herself based on this particular scenario.
From the strained relationship between Alice and Kevin to the bond between Mercy and Robin, Anne Tyler examines the different ways that family members interact with and influence one another in taking multiple decisions. Each chapter presents a different set of challenges and obstacles for the characters to navigate, and the way they handle these challenges sheds light on their relationships with one another Discuss how these themes of family dynamics and relationships manifest throughout the different chapters of the book.
Eddie struggles to reveal his orientation to his family, fearing rejection and judgment. However, he eventually learns that his family has always known and accepts him for who he is. Lily, on the other hand, makes a spur-of-the-moment decision to remarry without telling anyone, suggesting a desire to assert her own identity and pursue her own happiness. Do you think these two events highlight how important self-acceptance and not living a fabricated life is?
Mercy’s role as a dreamer causes her to live vicariously through her daughter Lily’s romantic adventures and encourages her infatuations and dalliances. This impacts her relationship with her family members as they are unaware of her desire for a separate life and cannot understand her eccentric art style and decision to move into her art studio. Her dreamer mentality also allows her to extend grace, space, and forgiveness to her family members, accepting their flaws and quirks without confrontation. Let’s talk about the character of Mercy based on this particular scenario. What are some things that you like about Mercy?
Robin’s mother dying of cancer when he was quite young shapes him into an insecure and underconfident human being. His aunt Alice’s pessimistic perspective further reinforces his negative outlook on life. This manifests in his interactions with his family, as he struggles to understand and accept their unique personalities and desires. I know this is a bit sensitive, but we have had our fair share of losses in our respective lives. Would anyone like to share with the group as to how loss can affect us emotionally and mentally and what the aftereffects are, particularly if you have lost something or someone at a very young age?
Lily’s impetuousness and emotionally driven personality cause her to react spontaneously to life, rather than planning her actions. This leads to her having numerous romantic liaisons throughout the narrative, which causes her father and sister to mock her. However, her mother remains uncritical, likely due to seeing herself in her daughter’s romantic life. How important a role does Lily’s mother play in being an uncritical parent based on this context? What would the consequences have been if Lily’s mother was highly critical of her actions?
David’s observant nature leads him to recognize the questionable nature of the adults around him, causing him to distance himself from his family after college. Despite this, he becomes a beloved teacher and a loving father. His marriage to Greta brings him the revelation of a mate who understands human actions and speaks with complete candor. Discuss how David’s traumatic childhood was the prime reason behind his inconsistent relationships with his family during the later years of his life.
Serena feels uncomfortable around James’s family because of the difference in their social status. Robin struggles with proposing to Mercy because he perceives himself as being from a lower social class than she is. Similarly, Mercy complains about the merchants around Deep Creek Lake catering to rich snobs, and Kevin, a business mogul, teases David about his unwillingness to get rid of his aged VW Beetle. What is your take on the way class distinction has been portrayed in the novel?

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French Braid: A novel Audio CD – Unabridged, March 22, 2022

Language English
Publisher Random House Audio
Publication date March 22, 2022
Dimensions 5.09 x 1.09 x 5.87 inches
ISBN-10 0593551621
ISBN-13 978-0593551622
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Audio; Unabridged edition (March 22, 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593551621
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593551622
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.09 x 1.09 x 5.87 inches
#9,552 in Books on CD
#21,429 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
#25,776 in Family Life Fiction (Books)

About the author

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grownups, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Thread, Vinegar Girl and Clock Dance.

In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence; and in 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize.

Customer reviews

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5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 41% 32% 19% 6% 3% 19%
5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 41% 32% 19% 6% 3% 6%
5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 41% 32% 19% 6% 3% 3%

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Customers say

Customers find the narrative style deeply relatable, endearing, and memorable. Opinions are mixed on readability, story quality, and character development. Some find the characters interesting and believable, while others say they seem superficial and fall flat. Readers disagree on the pacing and emotional content. Some find it quick and easy to follow, while others find it hard to follow and confusing.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the narrative style unique, relatable, and endearing. They also say the story is memorable and lovely. Readers mention the book is excellent and full of little quirks and kinks.

"...This opening chapter is structurally and thematically necessary ...." Read more

"...Wisps aside, French Braid is a small but satisfying novel with deep and enduring truths about the strands that inevitably draw families together." Read more

"...Once read fully, I understood how insightful, thoughtful and thought provoking this book is...." Read more

"...crafting of the story of a family at once both utterly unique and deeply relatable ...." Read more

Customers find the book warm, comfortable, and soft. They say it's gentle and sweet, and a good read to curl up with on a rainy day.

"...do much for me but "French Braid" is a welcome return to form; cozy on the outside , unsettling at its core...." Read more

"...Her stories are like coming home to a warm fire & a comfy chair on a cold night ...." Read more

"Nothing dramatic, but a warm comfortable book about three generations of a Baltimore family...." Read more

" So comforting to read about a family through the generations; what remains is the love...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the readability of the book. Some mention it's enjoyable, absorbing, and a great summertime read. Others say it's awful, not compelling, and a waste of money and time.

"...The writing, as always, is smooth and neat and tight and it's a pleasure to read . I truly couldn't find one single thing that offended me...." Read more

"...I have to say these people were hard to like , or understand, but it didn't stop me from reading the whole book." Read more

"...A good read but not very exciting." Read more

"... An enjoyable read ." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the story quality. Some mention it's lovely, engrossing, and entertaining. Others say the story is not plot-driven and drifts along.

"...This book did not hold my interest until the last third, then I did not put it down again until I finished reading it...." Read more

"...As always, Anne Tyler proves that excellent storytelling is attainable without the pointless distraction of frequent foul language — a trademark of..." Read more

"...A good read but not very exciting ." Read more

"...Consequently, when I went to write this review I had trouble remembering the actual story line ...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the character development. Some mention the characters are interesting and believable, while others say they seem superficial.

"... Every character is vividly developed , and each event is richly detailed and ultimately interwoven with others that are revealed in the effectively..." Read more

"...The characters aren't necessarily likable . In fact, Mercy, the main character, is downright infuriating...." Read more

"The author did an excellent job of character development and I enjoyed the way she organized the book...." Read more

"...I did find this book a little bit disjointed as it jumped from character to character ...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book. Some mention it's a quick read, while others say it's very hard to follow and confusing.

"...I just thought she was selfish and hard to relate to . But I still enjoyed the book immensely. Ms Tyler’s characters are just so human...." Read more

"...Every character is vividly developed, and each event is richly detailed and ultimately interwoven with others that are revealed in the effectively..." Read more

"...Anne Tyler is a wonderful writer, and both books demonstrate her skills . But these two books have so much in common that it is truly puzzling...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the emotional content of the book. Some mention it's not overwhelming, but rather melancholy or wistful. Others say it's depressing and drawn-out.

"...In fact, Mercy, the main character, is downright infuriating ...." Read more

"...There is humor and hurtfulness but no drama or revenge ...." Read more

"... Very depressing ." Read more

"...Not over done, not an overwhelming amount of emotion . Just right" Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the writing style of the book. Some mention it's easy reading, while others say the writing is prosaic and the commentary on life is superficial.

" Easy read . Entertaining. Each character has a distinct personality...." Read more

"...The writing is prosaic , the commentary on life, embarrassingly superficial. After each quarter of the book, I was convinced I would not continue...." Read more

"...seamlessly from one decade to the next so that the reader can easily see the through lines . A story of real families at their best." Read more

"...Anne Tyler's character development is extraordinary and the dialog is spot on ...." Read more

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French Braid by Anne Tyler

Publication Date: February 21, 2023
Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN-10: 0593466403
ISBN-13: 9780593466407
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French Braid by Anne Tyler book review
Everything about Anne Tyler's 24th novel, "French Braid," is immediately recognizable to her fans. The story offers such a complete checklist of the author's usual motifs and themes that ...
Anne Tyler, Close-Up Artist, Zooms Out for a Novel of Family Rifts
In her 24th novel, "French Braid," Tyler works on a bigger canvas than usual to explore the costs and rewards of family life amid secrets, distance and stifled ambition.
French Braid by Anne Tyler review: a quietly radical story
After finishing French Braid, the 24 th novel from the formidable American novelist, I was going about my life thinking nothing particularly radical had happened to me. And then I thought about it ...
FRENCH BRAID
A Kirkus review of Tyler's 24th novel, a family saga spanning 60 years. The review praises Tyler's specific and revealing detail, her homely metaphors, and her vital and creative writing at 80.
Review: 'French Braid,' by Anne Tyler
"French Braid," Anne Tyler's 24th novel, spans three generations of the Garrett family of Baltimore. At its heart are Robin and Mercy Garrett, married in the 1950s, tacitly separated 20 years later.
'French Braid' by Anne Tyler
Review copy courtesy of the publisher. Sometimes a novel just strikes the right mood. You pick it up, start reading and become so immersed in the story you lose all sense of time. Before you know it, you've read half the book — or at least made substantial inroads. This is how I felt when I read Anne Tyler's latest novel, French Braid.
Book Marks reviews of French Braid by Anne Tyler
For Tyler fans, this is familiar territory: the quotidian frictions and rewards of family life in white, middle-class Baltimore. But while her earlier novels were heavy on domestic details, vividly evoking the texture of daily life, French Braid is less fully imagined, the characters less developed. There are simply too many years to cover, too many children and grandchildren to keep track of.
Book review of French Braid by Anne Tyler
In French Braid, her skilled storytelling once again takes center stage as she reveals the minor family dramas that have resulted in Serena's inability to positively identify her cousin. Chapter by chapter, Tyler follows a different member of the Garrett family, beginning with a family vacation in 1959 and ending in spring 2020.
French Braid
Instead, French Braid offers something subtler and finer, the long view on family . . . For all its charm, French Braid is a quietly subversive novel, tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging." —Jennifer Haigh, New York Times Book Review (cover) "Brilliant . . . Captivating . . . The rich melody of ...
Book Summary and Reviews of French Braid by Anne Tyler
This information about French Braid was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter.Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication.
Book Review: French Braid by Anne Tyler
Book Review: French Braid by Anne Tyler. Mar 29, 2022 Mar 28, 2022 / Theresa Smith Writes. About the Book: The major new novel from the beloved prize-winning author — a brilliantly perceptive, painfully true, and funny journey deep into one family's foibles, from the 1950s right up to the changed world of today.
French Braid: A Novel
A review of Tyler's 24th novel, which explores the dysfunction and secrets of the Garrett family across generations. The review praises Tyler's signature style, characterization, and affection for Baltimore, but criticizes the lack of plot and tension.
Author Anne Tyler on writing her 24th novel and why she writes ...
NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with writer Anne Tyler about her 24th novel French Braid. Set in Baltimore, the book tracks one family, the Garretts, across decades and generations
French Braid: A novel: Tyler, Anne: 9780593321096: Amazon.com: Books
Instead, French Braid offers something subtler and finer, the long view on family . . . For all its charm, French Braid is a quietly subversive novel, tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging." —Jennifer Haigh, New York Times Book Review (cover) "Brilliant . . . Captivating . . .
French Braid Summary and Study Guide
Anne Tyler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer widely considered one of America's finest authors, released her novel French Braid in 2022. In many ways, the narrative is a return to the themes of several of her previous, highly regarded works. Once again, Tyler focuses on the frayed interpersonal workings of a middle-class Baltimore family over the course of several generations.
a book review by Caitlin HIcks: French Braid
At first glance, the new novel by Anne Tyler, French Braid, breaks all the rules of exemplary fiction. The opening page is so mundane and forgettable, it would be buzzed offstage in a First Page competition at any writing festival.
10 French Braid Book Club Questions to Discuss
French Braid Book Club Questions. The chance encounter between Serena and Nicholas at the beginning of the novel shows how disconnected the Garrett family members were from each other, even those who are related. Not keeping in touch with each other proved that they were not well acquainted with what was happening in their respective lives.
French Braid: A novel: Tyler, Anne, Farr, Kimberly: 9780593551622
Instead, French Braid offers something subtler and finer, the long view on family . . . For all its charm, French Braid is a quietly subversive novel, tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging." —Jennifer Haigh, New York Times Book Review (cover) "Brilliant . . . Captivating . . .
French Braid by Anne Tyler
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