Clock Dance by Anne Tyler - review: It’s never too late to take control of your own life

At 76, with more than 20 novels and a Pulitzer prize behind her, she is as pleasingly proficient and confident a writer as you would expect, says Katie Law

Towards the end of Clock Dance a character tells Willa Drake, the protagonist, that his wife’s “idea of hell would be marrying Gandhi”. In other words, marrying a saint would mean everyone else would seem rude, loud and self-centred by comparison. Willa, at this point 61, responds by saying that this is exactly what her own mother did by marrying her “meek” and “mild-mannered” father. As a result, Willa had come to believe that one either married Gandhi or had to be Gandhi.

The novel opens 50 years earlier, in 1967, when Willa, aged 11, and her sister come home from school to find that their volatile and occasionally violent mother has walked out after a row with their father. While he overcompensates and pretends nothing is wrong, Willa experiences the feelings of anxiety and dutifulness that will become second nature to her over time.

Fast-forward 10 years and Willa is a student in Illinois with a boyfriend, Derek, who wants to marry her. He also wants her to give up her scholarship, to study in California where he is about to start a new job. When he meets her parents for the first time and announces their engagement, he and Willa’s mother, who are as wilful and controlling as each other, clash. Willa has never seen her mother pushed back before. “Now she felt a sense of...more than gratitude — dazzlement.”

The next chapter takes place 20 years on. Willa is married to Derek; she has long since given up her ambitions of teaching, settling instead for being a compliant wife and mother to two sons, Ian and Sean. When Derek is killed in a road rage incident she has to deal not only with her grief but wider questions about her own agency. She has always allowed others to determine the course of her life, striving above all else to be a predictable mother “whose prime objective was to be taken for granted”.

The second half of the novel is set in 2017. Willa is now remarried to a tough, dull, golf-loving lawyer in Arizona; her sons are absent adults. One day she gets a call from a stranger in Baltimore telling her that Sean’s ex-girlfriend has been shot. There is no one to care for the wounded woman’s nine-year-old daughter, and the stranger — a neighbour — wrongly assuming that Willa is the girl’s grandmother, asks her to come and help.

Anne Tyler
PA

Sensing the chance to feel useful again, Willa flies to Baltimore — the setting for so many of Tyler’s novels — and, after some initial discombobulation, begins to imagine an alternative, happier life for herself in this rundown neighbourhood. For the first time, she is free to decide what she wants, although Tyler, being old-school, never uses the term “empowered”.

So while patterns of behaviour are laid down early in childhood and play out over time, she is telling us that it’s never too late to take back control and live however much of your life remains, as you, not others, want to.

At 76, with more than 20 novels and a Pulitzer prize behind her, she is as pleasingly proficient and confident a writer as you would expect. But this is not her best book. At times, the second half feels drawn out and laboured, with the final twist, such as it is, coming almost too late.

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler (Chatto, £18.99), buy it here.

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