Clock Dance

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Willa grew up with a moody mom and a docile dad. She helped raise her younger sister, Elaine, when her mom periodically stepped out of the house without warning. Willa is a good child, a responsible rule follower, and a peacemaker. She eventually marries her college boyfriend and has two sons, then becomes a widow when the boys are teenagers. If we are unsure of ourselves - our purpose - not finding it at home - why not reach out in completely new directions? And what I found interesting- and incredibly ‘present-day-modern-life relatable’, is the role that ‘strangers’ play in our lives. Part two of the novel begins with Willa, now sixty-one, reluctantly living in the golfing haven to which her second husband, Peter, has chosen to retire. Willa has no interest in golf and sits alone in an unfamiliar home while Peter tries to improve his handicap. When she receives a phone call telling her that her son’s former girlfriend Denise, a woman she has never met, has been shot in the leg and is in hospital, Willa impulsively flies to Baltimore. Even though Denise’s nine-year-old daughter, Cheryl, is not a blood relative, Willa cannot resist playing grandmother. And so her adventures begin. Amenable 61-year-old Willa Drake – “she was the only woman she knew whose prime objective was to be taken for granted” – has moved to Arizona with her second husband, humourless, golf-playing Peter. Her beloved (and equally amenable) father is dead; she doesn’t see much of her adult sons.

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler, review: Less nuanced than her best Clock Dance by Anne Tyler, review: Less nuanced than her best

Then Willa received a phone call from a woman in Baltimore, a neighbor of her son's ex-girlfriend. The ex-girlfriend was in the hospital and her daughter, Cheryl, needed a caregiver. The neighbor mistakenly thought that Willa was Cheryl's grandmother. Willa always wanted grandchildren so she jumped at the chance to travel to Baltimore. Willa bonds with Cheryl, the dog, and the quirky neighbors. She loved feeling needed, and part of the neighborhood. Reading this book madkes me realize how easily we sometimes give in, how we can absorb and accept things we never thought we could. How they become the new normal. How much simpler it is to just go along, but maybe not as satisfying. I loved the characters Willa meets in this novel, how she risks herself, slowly stepping out of her shell. But once one does, where does one go from there? Well, that's Willas story and she can tell it better. Like many of Tyler’s heroines, Willa’s talents only gradually emerge. Tiny details reveal the woman she has become in her sixties. Her carry-on case for the flight to Baltimore is the largest allowed: ‘She liked to dress nicely when she traveled.’ She can be manipulatively helpless: ‘Marriage was often a matter of dexterity, in Willa’s experience.’ Peter, who calls Willa ‘little one’, insists on accompanying her to Baltimore. ‘When have you ever traveled alone?’ She has, in fact, but Willa weakly acquiesces for the ‘comfort’ of being looked after. Her knowledge of five languages and long teaching career scarcely register. But arriving in unfamiliar surroundings causes Willa to ponder her own behaviour and that of her family. Peter clings to his laptop and mobile phone and is resentful of Willa’s interest in the new community. Having dinner with her son, who lives in Baltimore, Willa is disconcerted when he entertains his girlfriend with a gleefully spiteful critique of Peter. It occurs to her that she has spent her life apologising for men.As a child in the late 1960s, her family lives at the mercy of her tempestuous mother, whose mood swings and disappearances leave everyone on edge, wondering which woman will be present each day. In the late 1970s, as she is planning a course of study in college that fascinates her, her boyfriend has other ideas, which include marriage and her moving to California with him.

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler | Waterstones

Anne Tyler, one of this country’s great artists, has spent 50 years and more than 20 novels on the subject, her beautiful, understated, humane tales so similar in shape and voice that taken together they have come to seem like a subtle and sublime mania, the author explaining the same idea to herself over and over again, marveling anew each time at its mysteries. I loved Cheryl. I thought she was a sweet girl, yearning for some form of a traditional family, which I think is natural at the age of 9. I also loved her direct nature and how she didn’t miss a beat when talking with her mom. I found her commentary to be entertaining.Talk about the bond that develops between Willa and nine-year-old-soon-to-be-double-digit-Cheryl and Cheryl's mother, Denise, who has no difficulty depending on Willa's generosity. And how is Willa's personality perfectly shaped to fall in with this little family of two? Where families fail, friends and neighbours can fill the void. Willa’s encounters with Cheryl and Denise, and their sociable, oddball neighbours, are related in beadily observed, often hilarious accounts. Willa bonds with plump, precocious Cheryl, one of Tyler’s most appealing creations. Friends offer gifts and advice; the secret of Denise’s shooting is revealed; doctor Ben dispenses antibiotics and life-coaching. Some of this could have been cheesy, but in Tyler’s capable hands it is funny and interesting. It is Ben who coaxes Willa towards a more nuanced perspective on her parents’ marriage – ‘My wife used to say that her idea of hell would be marrying Gandhi,’ he muses – and Willa’s exuberant, gifted mother, maddened by saintliness, slips into focus. The Canadian novelist Carol Shields described the ‘true’ subject of serious fiction as being not ‘ongoing wars or political issues, but the search of an individual for his or her true home’. Tyler’s novel presents a moving portrait of a woman, late in life, discovering an environment in which she can flourish. The question is whether Willa will seize the opportunity offered or return to docile wifehood. Tyler keeps the reader in suspense until the final paragraphs. For People Who Devour Books Talk about Willa's relationship with her histrionic mother and her mild-mannered father? How have her parents' personalities shaped Willa's own personality and approach to life?

Clock Dance, by Anne Tyler book review - The Washington Post Clock Dance, by Anne Tyler book review - The Washington Post

Now in 2017, as a remarried wife in Arizona, she received an unexpected call asking her to come care for her 9-year old granddaughter, Cheryl, whose mom, Denise, was shot in Baltimore. As it turns out, Denise is the ex-girlfriend of Sean, one of Willa’s sons. Though she has no grandchildren, has never met Denise or Cheryl, and isn’t particularly close with her sons, something compels Willa to say yes, so she flies across the country with her husband, Peter, in tow.

Tyler loves to force her characters into direct confrontation with their unspoken hopes, away from their slantwise instincts. She’s an artful symbolist (take the running family card game in “Breathing Lessons,” for instance) and in Willa’s case her magnanimously abandoned gift for linguistics comes to seem increasingly meaningful as she finds, in Baltimore, her own speech. I’m not the only fan who has called Tyler the “Jane Austen of our time”; the comparisons are obvious: beautiful writing, accessibility, colorful characters, perfectly pitched dialogue, and a focus on domestic stories. And woe be to anyone who considers “domestic stories” a lesser literary form, for it is in these stories of quotidian family life, punctuated by human drama, that we most recognize ourselves and develop empathy for others. If you never read a novel about the human condition, how would you learn to appreciate other people’s perspectives? A charming new novel of self-discovery and second chances from the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Spool of Blue Thread. In Tyler’s effortless, uncluttered prose, the novel beautifully explores an older woman’s search for meaning and agency in her life.” — The Christian Science Monitor I know women like Willa, people who, without realizing it, do everything for the males around them, only to end up unappreciated. So when she discovers a new family – one in which she’s warmly welcomed – why wouldn’t she want to spend time with them?