He’s been a rebel for most of his life, never really settling to anything. The one outlier in all this family togetherness is Red and Abby’s son Denny. “It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon.” There’s also the one about the day in 1959 when Abby fell in love with Red, a story that always begins. How “Junior” became the owner of the house on Boulton Road, and how Red’s sister Merrick got a jump up the social ladder when she stole her best friend’s wealthy boyfriend Junior. The Whitshaws, though not a family with a long lineage, nevertheless consider themselves specially close, held together by stories, told and re-told over the years until they became fact. Keeping track of everyone and how they were related, proved challenging at first so I ended up making a who’s who list. The younger generation includes their son Red (a builder like his father) and daughter in law Abby, their four children (Amanda, Jeanie, Dennie and Stem) and their respective partners and children. Now it has “ the comfortably shabby air of a place whose inhabitants had long stopped seeing it.” The Whitshaw family home was one he built for a client with meticulous attention to detail, right down to the pantry shelves and cabinet knobs. He’s a builder, a carpenter much lauded in Baltimore for his craftsmanship. But it didn’t have that uniqueness and originality of style or perspective that I expect in a Booker contender.Ī Spool of Blue Thread features the elder Whitshank generation “Junior” and his wife Linnae, about whom little is known, even by their children. It’s a very finely observed study of characters and the intricacies of familial relationships that held my attention over 400 pages. I don’t mean to sound disparaging about Tyler’s novel. Which makes the inclusion of A Spool of Blue Thread in multiple award lists rather a surprise, particularly when one of those prizes was the 2015 Booker shortlist. Anne Tyler’s novel about four families of the Whitshank family falls into the category of books I consider “enjoyable but not remarkable”.
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