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Can Her Daughter’s Wedding, and a Cat, Revive Her Own Marriage?
In Anne Tyler’s new novel, a socially inept mother faces hurdles in her personal, professional and family lives.
THREE DAYS IN JUNE, by Anne Tyler
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.”
