'A Spool of Blue Thread' Spins a Disappointingly Disconnected Tale

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. 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. 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.

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. Specifically, Abby is in constant conflict with her husband Red. 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. Abby’s problem with death is precisely “that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.” She longs for prolonged goodbyes. By contrast, Red believes in letting things play themselves out in an instantaneous ending. Their argument carries through the rest of the novel and affects other aspects of their lives, making a lively tension that could have been an opportunity for Tyler to draw unusual connections between character and plot.

But Tyler’s efforts to reflect the theme of these two contrasting attitudes, in the form of the book, stretches too thin. Some threads go on almost endlessly, perhaps reflecting Abby’s perspective, and Tyler fails to end them clearly. Even by the end, many characters’ lives continue onwards in a sporadic fashion that leaves the reader uncertain of where the Whitshanks are actually going to settle in their lives. Just as disappointingly, other parts of the book wrap up abruptly without providing much of a storyline to begin with, which may represent Red’s philosophy of endings. Even though the book opens with Denny telling his father that he’s gay, for example, this is never actually explored and is almost entirely dropped. No matter how closely one reads, it is never obvious whether Denny was telling the truth about being gay, or, if not, what his motives were for telling his father in the first place. Tyler’s clumsy and inefficient plotting is unsatisfying and leads to vague conclusions.

Although Tyler develop her characters is greater detail in the book’s middle section, they remain unapproachably abstract at the story’s close. Abby and her nomadic son Denny stand to be the most complex people, but even they fall flat. The one bit of information learned about Denny is that he fears being “stuck in his family, trapped...ingrown, like a toenail,” which explains why he dislikes his mother’s intrusions in his life. Many events over the course of the novel accordingly focus on his disappearance and reappearance, yet Tyler fails to provide conclusions and proper backstories to Denny’s behavior. Similarly, Abby’s storyline lacks intrigue outside of her role as a secret keeper. Abby is more interested in the stories of others than in developing one of her own: whether it’s the constant invitation of strangers to family dinners or her irritation at her children confiding in one another instead of her, Abby lacks her own motivation and does not develop as a character outside of the people who confide in her. Tyler does not flesh out her background until the end, but the matriarch’s passive portrayal continues to lack depth even after her backstory is fully exposed.

On the other hand, “A Spool of Blue Thread” is still a relatable and amusing book. Although the characters are unfinished, they are three-dimensional in one important way that readers may emphasize with: they have their secrets. The secret behind the adoption of Abby’s son Stem, for example, which Abby hides from the entire family, explains Stem’s anger as well as Denny’s resentment towards his mother, Red’s sense of duty to Stem, and Abby’s overbearing parenting methods. Tyler’s thoughtful depiction of these secrets and their repression creates the image of a complex and unsettled family holding on to one another even while struggling with personal calamities that distance them from each other.

The novel’s most interesting strength is in the parallelism Tyler establishes between the Whitshanks and their family home, the site of their secrets. The house, which was built by Abby’s father-in-law Junior to mark the beginning of the Whitshank family, has its own storyline. Tyler writes that in the house “the wallpaper...was showing its seam too distinctly. In fact, the seam was separating.” This symbol of the characters’ attempts to hide their own true natures emphasizes the strife and weaknesses within the family in a way that fortifies their complex development. The connections illuminated by the interplay of the Whitshanks’ secrets and their life in the house add some depth to the personality of each family member and the group as a whole in a way that almost rescues the novel.

The Whitshank family is entertaining, and a few of its members’ problems are laid out in intricate details which, now and then, contain genuine appeal. Tyler would have benefited from limiting the stories included to just those few. But unfortunately, she spends a good portion of the book stuck in prolonged ending and at the same time the book itself ends too fast. “A Spool of Blue Thread” proves unable to mend Tyler’s disconnected portrait of the entire family.