Abby and her nomadic son Denny stand to be the most complex people, but even they fall flat. Tyler’s clumsy and inefficient plotting is unsatisfying and leads to vague conclusions.Īlthough Tyler develop her characters is greater detail in the book’s middle section, they remain unapproachably abstract at the story’s close. No matter how closely one reads, it is never obvious whether Denny was telling the truth about being gay, or, if not, what his motives were for telling his father in the first place. Even though the book opens with Denny telling his father that he’s gay, for example, this is never actually explored and is almost entirely dropped.
Just as disappointingly, other parts of the book wrap up abruptly without providing much of a storyline to begin with, which may represent Red’s philosophy of endings. Even by the end, many characters’ lives continue onwards in a sporadic fashion that leaves the reader uncertain of where the Whitshanks are actually going to settle in their lives. Some threads go on almost endlessly, perhaps reflecting Abby’s perspective, and Tyler fails to end them clearly. Their argument carries through the rest of the novel and affects other aspects of their lives, making a lively tension that could have been an opportunity for Tyler to draw unusual connections between character and plot.īut Tyler’s efforts to reflect the theme of these two contrasting attitudes, in the form of the book, stretches too thin. By contrast, Red believes in letting things play themselves out in an instantaneous ending. You won’t know the ending.” She longs for prolonged goodbyes. Abby’s problem with death is precisely “that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. Red’s parents died when their car stalled on railroad tracks, prompting Red and Abby to realize that they see the end of life differently. Specifically, Abby is in constant conflict with her husband Red.
The tone of the novel is split between two opposing perspectives on death and human relationships, which gives Tyler a compositional challenge she does not fully meet. Tyler uses multiple points of view and chronological variations in developing her characters, and in doing so she seems to take after the philosophy expressed by Abby Whitshank, the mother, who asks at one point, “Why select just a few stories to benefit yourself?” But the novel, an otherwise enjoyable book, suffers from this decision. Four generations of an American family, the Whitshanks, are depicted in its pages, where each person contributes to the intricate web of secrets at the novel’s center.
Anne Tyler’s “A Spool of Blue Thread,” the 20th novel by the Pultizer Prize-winning author, is loaded with ideas and potentially fascinating storylines that are extended throughout the book but somehow not given proper closure.
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