Hail, hail, Baltimore, the only city whose N.F.L. team is named after a poem. Baltimore has given us, as well as Edgar Allan Poe, H.L. Mencken, Billie Holiday, John Waters, “Diner” and “The Wire.” Let’s not forget Anne Tyler, whose 25th novel, “Three Days in June,” drops next week.
This is not Tyler’s best novel, nor is it her worst, though it’s closer to the bottom than to the top. Like many of her later books, “Three Days in June” is a frugal series of plotlines — regarding a wedding, a cat in need of a home, a late-life reconciliation — that allow her to dip into familiar themes: family, fragility that intertwines with resilience, and finally, forgiveness.
Picking up “Three Days in June,” you recognize the well-worn lucidity and ease of Tyler’s sometimes homely sentences. You recognize her avidity for the mundane, which can rival Stephen King’s. “Three Days in June” is the sort of novel in which characters get pretty excited about microwaving a pair of potpies. The narrator comments, while being waited on by a teenager in a restaurant: “Evidently all the ‘hon’-type waitresses in their 60s had taken early retirement during the pandemic.”
This novel may be set after Covid, but it is almost entirely shorn of contemporary culture. Tyler’s characters seem to live in a time warp — in what Walter Winchell used to call the Oh-So-Long-Ago. You can imagine them watching Johnny Carson on late-night television, but not quite Jimmy Fallon. After all, the narrator owns a television that sticks out a foot and a half from the wall. The four walls of this novel can seem to be closing in.
That narrator is Gail Baines, who is having a hard couple of days. At 61, she’s being pushed out of her job as the assistant headmistress at a private girl’s school. Her daughter, Debbie, is getting married — but the groom may have already cheated on her. What’s more, Gail’s semi-estranged ex-husband, Max, has come to town for the wedding and he’s dragged along a cat that needs a home, one he hopes Gail will adopt.
Gail is tetchy. She lacks tact and diplomacy, she is often told. She refuses to butter up wealthy parents. She is told to stop saying things like, “Good God, Mrs. Morris, surely you realize your daughter doesn’t have the slightest chance of getting into Princeton.”
Gail is fickle and aloof; she lacks people skills. She wonders if she has ruined her life by worrying too much, by being too critical, by wanting everything to be too perfect. She is not the kind of woman who would hide a stone in a snowball, but you can imagine her reaching that point.
Along comes Max, back into her life. He’s a messy, big-hearted schlub. They are going to get back together, or they are not. It’s touch and go. And what about that cat? Raymond Chandler suspected his cat, Taki, was keeping a diary. If this (unnamed) cat were keeping one, there would not be a lot to report.
Those who have read Tyler for a long time will slide nostalgically into this novel. The headline on The Minnesota Star Tribune’s review — “Need a Hug? Read the latest from the great Anne Tyler” — made me sharply ill, just for a moment. That may have been because I have the flu.
Tyler’s best and best-known novels include “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” (1982), “The Accidental Tourist” (1985), which was made into a film starring William Hurt and Geena Davis, and “Breathing Lessons” (1988), which won a Pulitzer Prize. One of her more recent novels, “A Spool of Blue Thread,” was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2015.
In “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant,” a character comments: “It’s closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.” It’s the same reticence that Gail is trying to put behind her. She thinks things like “Someday I’d like to get credit for not saying all the things I could have said” and “Sometimes when I find out what’s on other people’s minds I honestly wonder if we all live on the same planet.”
She wants only food that reminds her of the tastes of her childhood. I could imagine her saying what Bob Dylan does in “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” his recent book: “Enjoy your free-range, cumin-infused, cayenne-dusted heirloom reduction. Sometimes it’s just better to have a BLT and be done with it.”
While I was reading “Three Days in June,” the pages did not turn themselves, but it is good enough that I did not resent my fingers for doing the job.
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