Patchett’s usual leaping-off point takes a group of strangers and throws them together into an unusual situation to see what happens. It strikes me that Tyler and Ann Patchett use similar approaches to their work. In Tyler’s fictional families, if anyone actually serves milk and cookies, there’s something vaguely discomfiting about it. Still, there’s a perpetual edge to her stories. Tyler offers literary comfort food without apology as she noted in a 2015 interview, a reader looks to Philip Roth for “piss and vinegar” and to her for “milk and cookies.” It is long since readers have understood her universe and eagerly return to it with each new release. There is a phenomenon at work when the quietest possible story with the sparest of plots still compels a reader to sit for hours and let the tale unspool in its own time, content to see where it will go next - even when it’s clear the path is through familiar territory.įrench Braid is Tyler’s 24th novel, and that body of work forms a unified whole of style, place, and character.
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