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APRIL 6�13, 2022
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The avoidances and silences of family life in ‘French Braid’
By Laurie Hertzel
Star Tribune
“F
rench Braid,” Anne Ty-
ler’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 fi rst a housewife and mother,
and then an artist. She paints
portraits of people’s homes,
focusing on one modest de-
tail — a doorstop, a newel post,
or the fringed trim of a curtain.
“Am I missing something? she
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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 qui-
etly moves into her studio a few
miles from home.
She plans the move care-
fully, 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
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discusses any of this with her
husband. He never asks.
Life is easier with no confron-
tation, 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 com-
plicated 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 Gar-
rett 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 om-
niscient narrator, a great skill of
Tyler’s — that bring heft to this
largely plotless book. “French
Braid” is fi lled with piercing
observation.
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Robin and Mercy’s children
grow up wary. It’s easier, David
fi gures, 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 ar-
rangement of keeping secrets
and not asking questions fi lters
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 fran-
tic best to pretend to be in
the dark.
“Oh, babe,” Claude fi nally
tells Eddie. “She knows. She
knew all along.”
Late in the novel, Robin tells
himself that the greatest ac-
complishment of his life was
that “not a single one of his chil-
dren guessed that Mercy wasn’t
living at home anymore.”
Of course, earlier, their son-
in-law had noted, “It was bizarre
... how something so obvious
was never, ever talked about.”
Without trust, without
confi dences, family members
unbraid themselves from each
other and drift apart. But the
ties are not so easily undone,
and the eff ects 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.”
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