Anne Tyler: Clock Dance, 9781524711436, paperback, Alfred A. Knopf (Penguin Random House) N.Y.July 2018

I just finished reading “Clock Dance” by Anne Tyler and was totally charmed by this novel.  The portrait of her main character Willa Drake stretches over 50 years and with four major life events she paints Willa so precisely, I felt I had known her for a very long time.  Anne Tyler has been called by critics as one of America’s best living novelist. She was also the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 having been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in the UK in 2015 as well.  

The novel opens in 1967 when Wilma is a school girl and her eccentric mother has left the family again. Already acutely aware of the underlying troubles in her parents’ marriage, her beloved father tries to downplay her mother’s absence assuring the children that everything is ok.  1977, Willa is in college and about to be engaged. On her flight home to introduce her boyfriend Derek to her parents something crazy happens on the plane, making her less sure of Derek’s true character and hesitant about leaving college to get married.  In 1997 Willa has just lost her husband in a car accident and is trying to piece her life together for herself and her two sons Ian and Sean.  During all these years Willa accepts the path that everyone seems to have laid out for her and does what is expected.

The longest and for me most satisfying part of the novel starts in 2017 when Willa, remarried and in her sixties,  makes a surprise decision to temporarily move to Baltimore to help care for Cheryl, the daughter of her son Sean’s  ex- girlfriend Denise who was shot in the leg.  Her spoiled husband accompanies her after trying to talk her out of this project  failing miserably and never understanding that the real reason for Wilma’s act of kindness is trying to install some meaning of life into their currently stale existence in a retirement community in Arizona.  The portrayal of her time in Baltimore, Denise and Cheryl’s colorful neighborhood, her love for Cheryl, the substitute grandchild she will probably never have, her estrangement to her sons and sister Elaine, her egotistical husband and her desire to follow her own path for once are exquisitely narrated.

I loved this book and her writing.