Tyler takes aim at a sentimental trope deeply embedded in American culture. For all its charm, French Braid is a quietly subversive novel, tacklinging fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging. It looks squarely at the consequences of stifled female ambition - to the woman herself, and to those in her orbit. The novel is imbued with an old-school feminism of a kind currently unfashionable.
French Braid is the opposite of reassuring. It is a moving meditation on the passage of time. French Braid is a novel about what is remembered, what we’re left with when all the choices have been made, the children raised, the dreams realized or abandoned. Instead, French Braid offers something subtler and finer, the long view on family: what remains years later, when the particulars have been sanded away by time. Five decades into her career, one gets the sense that Tyler is no longer quite so interested in the details.
The younger Garretts are drawn haphazardly, or not at all. There are simply too many years to cover, too many children and grandchildren to keep track of. But while her earlier novels were heavy on domestic details, vividly evoking the texture of daily life, French Braid is less fully imagined, the characters less developed. For Tyler fans, this is familiar territory: the quotidian frictions and rewards of family life in white, middle-class Baltimore.
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