Book review: Anne Tyler's 'Clock Dance' a delight in print or audio

By Linda C. Brinson

Special to the News & Record
Jul 29, 2018

The 100 best novels / No 96 / Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1988)

“Clock Dance” is Anne Tyler at her best, and that is very good. A much-honored author of more than 11 novels, Tyler won the Pulitzer Prize for her 11th novel, “Breathing Lessons,” published in 1988.

Anne Tyler

She may be the best American writer mining the fertile field of families, of how people interact over time with the ones they are supposed to love, and how those interactions shape them.

“Clock Dance” is not as laugh-out-loud funny as some of Tyler’s earlier books, but it certainly has plenty of humorous moments, some of them wryly humorous. And, it is full of the wisdom and perspective that Tyler has gleaned as she has written and lived. Now 76, she has much to offer readers, and “Clock Dance” serves up her rich, gentle, often amusing insights in a captivating story.

Although she mostly writes about Baltimore, the setting for the latter part of this novel, North Carolina can claim Tyler as one of our own. She grew up here, living in a Quaker community in Celo, then attending high school in Raleigh and graduating at age 19 from Duke University, where she studied with Reynolds Price and William Blackburn.

“Clock Dance” is the story of Willa Drake, who grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, the older daughter of a volatile mother and a gentle, long-suffering father.

Tyler skips long sections of Willa’s life, describing in detail the pivotal events that determined everything else. We learn about the night in 1967 when Willa was 11 and her mother abandoned the family for a while. We see her 10 years later in college, aspiring to a career in languages but deciding, after a traumatic event on an airplane, to yield to the pressure of her charming Californian boyfriend, Derek, to marry him before her senior year.

Fast-forward to 1997, when Derek is killed and Willa finds herself, the mother of two teenage boys, trying to figure out life without him.

Then it’s 2017, time for Part II of the novel, and the events that make up the heart of “Clock Dance.”

Tyler deftly and unobtrusively uses these gaps in time to convey the idea that for much of her life, Willa has been more or less going through the motions, deferring to others, being a “good girl,” not making waves, just getting by.

Anne Tyler

That’s more or less what she’s doing in 2017, remarried to a semi-retired lawyer who often calls her “little one,” living in a golf community in Arizona even though she doesn’t play golf, and hearing little from her two grown sons.

Then she gets an unexpected phone call.

The call is from a neighbor of a woman her older son, Sean, briefly lived with in Baltimore. The woman, Denise, has been shot and is in the hospital, and the neighbor needs somebody to take care of Denise’s 9-year-old daughter, Cheryl, and their dog, Airplane. The neighbor assumes Willa is the child’s grandmother, although Willa has never met Denise or Cheryl and has been sadly resigned to the fact that she might never be a grandmother.

Willa, of course, says she’s not going to Baltimore, but then she does. Peter, her disapproving husband, goes with her. To Willa’s surprise, and Peter’s consternation, she finds not only that she’s needed, but also that she actually enjoys taking care of Cheryl and Airplane, and eventually Denise.

Anne Tyler

The less-than-upscale Baltimore neighborhood where Denise lives is full of the sorts of eccentric yet totally believable characters that Anne Tyler is a genius at creating. Surprising herself, Willa feels right at home.

By book’s end, Willa is learning that she can dance through the hours life gives her, rather than just plodding through mechanically. “Clock Dance” is an entertaining, heartwarming story about second chances and the real meaning of family — which sometimes has nothing at all to do with blood or marriage.

The book is a delight in print or audio.

In the audio version, the story comes magically alive through the reading of Kimberly Farr, a seasoned actress.

GREENSBORO