Anne Tyler’s books don’t feel like novels. Reading them you feel more like you are in the middle of someone’s life. The people she chronicles are so real you can almost touch them, yet her stories are far removed from the clash of contemporary events. She has been heralded as the Jane Austen of our age, making up for what her novels lack in plot with rich emotional drama — and a new Anne Tyler is always an event. French Braid, which comes out on Tuesday, is Tyler’s 24th novel and eagerly anticipated, even though the Pulitzer-prizewinning novelist is the last person on earth to make a noise about her books. “I’m not particularly rooted in the outside world,” Tyler, who is 80, tells me.
She gives few interviews — until 2012 her UK publisher had only met her once, for a lunch. Although when she does make a public appearance it is packed to the rafters with passionate readers (Nick Hornby is one of her many literary admirers).
We are meeting at Tyler’s light-filled home in Baltimore, the setting for most of her books. She has come to love the hardscrabble city made famous by the TV crime drama The Wire, although she didn’t always feel that way. When she moved there in 1965 with her husband, Taghi Modarressi, an Iranian child psychiatrist and novelist, she felt very isolated.
“We rented a home in a stodgy neighbourhood where old ladies lived in six-bedroom houses,” she explains. “One neighbour would lean out of the window and yell, ‘Iranians go home!’ I didn’t have any friends until my daughters went to school.
“I had always wanted to time travel,” she adds. “I came to think of Baltimore as a time machine, that I was just taking a look and wouldn’t be here for ever. But now I see I’m here for life. It has got so much grit and character.”
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Beneath her gentle demeanour Tyler has a steely core. She dislikes the term “cancel culture”, but she is horrified by its implications for literature. “I’m astonished by the appropriation issue,” she says. “It would be very foolish for me to write, let’s say, a novel from the viewpoint of a black man, but I think I should be allowed to do it.
“If an incredibly talented person has written novels in the 1930s or 40s and all of a sudden it is discovered that there was something he said or did — even something as bad as sexual harassment — he should be condemned for it,” she adds, “but I don’t see why you should withdraw his novels from publication.
“We couldn’t look at Gauguin’s paintings, could we? They would have to be destroyed or put away.” Later I notice she has Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita on her shelves. I ask whether anybody has suggested she shouldn’t have a male leading character, as in The Accidental Tourist, one of her best-loved books (which became a Hollywood film, starring the late William Hurt). “No, but I expect it to happen any day now,” she replies.
Writing is her life, but Tyler regards herself as something of an accidental novelist — she began her first when she was stuck at home without a job. “I never planned to be a writer at all. For years, maybe even today, sometimes I think, ‘What exactly am I going to do with my life? What is my career going to be? I’m only 80, for God’s sake!”
Her novels explore families with big secrets and small lies. Parents and children rub along irritably, awkwardly and tenderly. “I am fascinated by endurance,” she says. “Human beings really do lead lives of quiet desperation. It’s admirable really. Families are basically the only group that can’t easily split up. It is my version of a disaster movie, you put people in a burning building and see how they behave under duress.”
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There has been a bit of a ballyhoo that French Braid mentions Covid-19, but it is a stretch to describe it as a “pandemic-themed” novel, as did The New York Times.
“My plots are just time, if you think about it,” she says. “Time passes and eventually somebody will die and somebody will get married. I would love to have a real plot.” I am not convinced. One of her characters says they don’t like murder mysteries because “I don’t care whodunnit”. True, she laughs. “I don’t care whodunnit. It happened. What can I say? They’re dead!”
In French Braid Mercy has cast aside her longing to be an artist until her children have grown up. Then, bit by bit, she eases herself out of the family home into a clutter-free studio, leaving her good-hearted, salt-of-the-earth husband behind. “Sometimes people live first one life and then another life,” Mercy tells her grandchild. “First a family life then a whole other kind of life. That’s what I’m doing.”
The story echoes Ladder of Years, in which a woman walks out on her family during a beach holiday. “I got so many letters from people saying, ‘I always wanted to do that,’ ” Tyler says. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, my favourite novel, Pearl, the family matriarch, is abandoned by her husband but never finds the right moment to tell the children he has gone. As with a lot of her plot twists, I couldn’t help thinking, “Well, that’s not very likely,” until I suddenly remembered something similar had happened to me. I was five years old and “visiting” Grandma with my mother, when I found myself enrolled in a new school. “If you look closely enough, everybody’s family is strange,” Tyler observes.
She is not sure her characters’ disappearing acts can work any more. “You wouldn’t believe how much the existence of cell phones has changed plots,” she observes. “You can’t lose touch with somebody as easily as you used to. You can’t lose their phone number, or if you move to a new place everybody still knows how to call you.”
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Tyler resents the tyranny of availability. “I’ve had actual arguments with my daughters and several friends, because I go for a walk every morning and everybody says I should take my cell phone. I just feel like I want to disconnect, but they nagged me so much that I’ve started putting it in a tiny hanging wallet around my shoulder.”
Years ago she had a T-shirt with the slogan “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. A woman stopped her and said, “I would love to have that!”, missing the literary reference to Gabriel García Márquez but enjoying the sentiment.
Perhaps Tyler might have won the Nobel prize for literature too by now if her sphere were not so domestic. When she bought her house she was dismayed to find it had a large basement as she had a horror of filling it up. There is a quiet, airy room upstairs where she writes. Her furniture is tastefully minimalist. She loves art and I think perhaps she is like Mercy, but she demurs.
“No, there is none of me in my novels. We all have private, negative feelings we don’t talk about but I don’t think I have secrets.”
She is close to her daughters, who live on opposite sides of America; Tezh, her eldest, in Philadelphia, and Mitra in San Francisco. Her marriage was extremely happy, even though it began with a casual “Why not?” when Taghi unexpectedly proposed. She was 21. He was “just perfect for me”, but died of lymphoma in 1997. The blows kept coming. A few months later she found out that she had breast cancer, and she was waiting for a double mastectomy when Tezh was diagnosed with a brain tumour. These were frightening times.
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On Desert Island Discs she described going to the hospital for her surgery with Tezh in a head bandage from hers. Sheep May Safely Graze by Bach — one of her husband’s favourite pieces of music — came on the radio. “It seemed like Taghi was talking to us.”
She wondered, “How am I going to get through life without him?” but managed, one cup of coffee and other simple steps at a time. Like so many of her characters she was obliged to have a second life on her own. Tyler writes with huge sympathy for men. “I was raised with three brothers — all very good men — and I had a wonderful father,” she says. “I wasn’t so close to my mother. She was unpredictable. You didn’t know if she was going to be angry or not. I trusted men more.”
Tyler was born in Minnesota, but her early years were spent in a commune in the Appalachian mountains, before her parents settled in Raleigh, North Carolina. The way of life suited her father, a Quaker from birth, but her mother disliked it. “When we left I think it was my mother saying, ‘We can’t do this.’ ”
Objectively I would say her mother had reason to be cross. The men in her life were pernickety, like Macon in The Accidental Tourist. “Most interesting people are a bit on the spectrum,” Tyler tells me. “Two of my brothers never let their wives fill the dishwasher because ‘they did it all wrong’. I remember my father telling my mother she did it wrong, too, although he didn’t go so far as to take it out of her hands.”
She describes herself as introverted. “If I am cast into a hugely disorganised, noisy social situation I’m not happy.” Yet she was bold enough to study Russian at Duke University in the early 1960s. Then came her rapid marriage to Taghi. “If that wasn’t an act of rebellion, I don’t know what was. My mother kept saying, ‘Don’t forget he could take many wives.’
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“ ‘Tell her you’ll always be my favourite one,’ ” he would respond. Taghi, a radical who had left Iran under the shah, discouraged her from learning Farsi — it’s too difficult, he would say — but she secretly taught herself the language. It came in useful on her only trip to Tehran, when she found hundreds of his relatives waiting to greet her at the airport.
Her novels are deceptive. For a loner Tyler remains deeply engaged in the world. “I wish I weren’t,” she says. “I don’t really sleep much at night and I don’t want to read or get up, so the only thing I can think of is to listen to the BBC news all night long. It’s such a bad idea. There is never any good news.”
During Donald Trump’s presidency and, later, the storming of the Capitol, “I got my heart broken when I saw the US constitution wasn’t really very well defended.” She continues: “After I hear the news from Ukraine these days I really can’t sleep,” she says. “I so admire the Ukrainians’ courage and the open-heartedness of their neighbours in offering them refuge. And I try to remind myself that a country’s people are not always synonymous with that country’s government — as shown by the many brave Russian citizens risking arrest to protest what is happening.”
Global warming is another source of anxiety. “I worry I shouldn’t have had children, which of course you can’t really say. I worry our grandchildren won’t thank us.” Imagine a life without children or family entanglements. It would mean a life without Anne Tyler novels. That would never do.
