I love what Serena says about being from a small family and envying people with big ones: “she had envied her school friends with their swarms of relatives all mixed up and shrieking with laughter and fighting for space and attention. The way readers get to know Mercy’s family is first through her granddaughter Serena, who is otherwise a bit player in the family drama, a person so tenuously connected that when she sees her cousin Nicholas at a train station she’s not sure if it’s him or not. You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free the ripples are crimped in forever.” It’s mentioned once, almost at the end of the novel, when Mercy’s youngest child, David, remembers his step-daughter’s braid and how, “when she undid them, her hair would still be in ripples, little leftover squiggles, for hours and hours afterward….that’s how families work, too. Who else can see the significance of some of the otherwise-forgotten episodes when they recur with variations? While other authors occasionally use dramatic irony, Tyler’s perspective seems to me fully rooted in the older characters–mostly, in this novel, in Mercy, whose name resonates symbolically through the generations. It’s a family saga, and reading it made me wonder if all such sagas are told, at least implicitly, from the point of view of one of the older members of the family. I spent an entire afternoon reading the new Anne Tyler novel, French Braid, and that’s the right way to enjoy it, if you have the uninterrupted time.
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