Review of A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Review of A Spool of Blue Thread: A Novel. This novel by Pulitzer-Prize winning American writer Anne Tyler is about a family and about a house: the house in Baltimore where several generations of the Whitshank family have lived. As a University instructor who teaches a seminar on Understanding Place, I have read many student papers on family homes. The houses we grow up in, the houses where we visit grandparents, and where we raise our own families have a profound effect on our memories, our sense of identity and belonging. Picture Grandma and you will imagine her in her kitchen baking or in her living room playing the piano or in her yard gardening. In her novel, Tyler has tapped into this near universal sense of connectedness to the place that is home. Against this backdrop she shows us the frustrations, disappointments and joys that are so common to family life. In contrast to the forward progression of many novels, she leads us from the present back to earlier generations of the same family, so that we see the story unfold through time, complete with changes to the house: from its construction, when it is up-to-date and modern, to its weathering and aging, just as generations weather and age. We get to know Abby, the aging hippy mother who senses that she has never really grown up; Denny, her son, whose feelings of resentment stunt his life; Red, her husband, whose father built the house; Linnie Mae, her mother-in-law, who makes a life for herself with the man she loves, against all odds. This is an ordinary middle class family, tugged at by rivalry and misunderstanding; and by the sense of falling short, of never quite fitting in. The house is what it is to many middle class families: a symbol of having arrived, of success and material comfort. And also a symbol of the passage of time. Houses are built, houses age and pass on; as people, too, age and die--and families move on to the next generation. I was struck by what one of Abby’s daughters says at the end of Part 1, looking at the chaos of moving day: “It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it’s all going to end”(217). Despite this downward tug of dissolution, the novel offers us a kind of answer to “why we bother,” in small and poignant moments of revelation, connection, and forgiveness.



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