A Spool of Blue Thread

Summary (from the publisher): "It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture. Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. from Red's father and mother, newly-arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red's grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor.

Brimming with all the insight, humour, and generosity of spirit that are the hallmarks of Anne Tyler's work, A Spool of Blue Thread tells a poignant yet unsentimental story in praise of family in all its emotional complexity. It is a novel to cherish.  

 

Review: This novel is a lovely portrait of a family. Abby and Red Whitshank and their four grown children have many years of accumulated memories, secrets, disappointments, and happy moments accumulated in their home, which just happens to be a house that Red's father built. With the house as their anchor, this novel spans from the 1920s to the twenty first century in Baltimore, weaving in an out of different perspectives within the family and different time periods, unfolding the complexities that only someone who has lived inside of a family for many years could fully understand and appreciate.

 

This was simply a lovely, lovely novel. Tyler breathes such life into her characters and makes this tale of a rather ordinary family and an ordinary life heartbreakingly beautiful. However, this novel lacks much of a climax and instead sort of meanders throughout the years of the family. In fact, the first several chapters felt almost more like interconnected short stories rather than a novel. Tyler unpacks a lot of complexities about this family in this book but yet leaves much unsaid; just like the spool of thread, this family is one that began before the novel began and will surely continue on after the final page. And also like a spool of thread, the novel slowly unravels and moves backward in time, revealing the earlier stories, the thread that underlies the outermost layer, that came before.

 

In many ways, this novel functions almost like a biography of the Whitshank family. Decidedly individual, they can still be summed up as a whole: "They shifted uneasily in their chairs during any talk of religion. They liked to say that they didn't care for sweets, although there was some evidence that they weren't as averse as they claimed. To varying degrees they tolerated each other's spouses, but they made no particular effort with the spouses' families, whom they generally felt to be not quite as close and kindred-spirited as their own family was" (56).

 

One of the most poignant images in the book is the Whitshank's description of the family that has vacationed beside them for many years: "So for all these years - thirty-six, now - the Whitshanks had watched from a distance while the slender young parents next door grew thicker through the middle and their hair turned gray, and their daughters changed from children to young women" (135). It's Abby and Red's daughter Jeanne who recognizes this symmetry and says, "They're us, in a way" (136). From the outside, it's simply a family progressing through time, but a closer look reveals a much richer story.

 

Stars: 4