![]() ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |