{"id":7897,"date":"2018-06-21T11:15:33","date_gmt":"2018-06-21T11:15:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7897"},"modified":"2018-06-25T11:24:54","modified_gmt":"2018-06-25T11:24:54","slug":"clock-dance-by-anne-tyler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7897","title":{"rendered":"Clock Dance by Anne Tyler"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Chatto & Windus\/ Knopf US <\/strong><\/p>\n

304pp, hbk, \u00a318.99\/$26.95<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The story of Willa Drake begins in 1967, on an ordinary suburban day in Lark City, Pennsylvania, when she is eleven years old.\u00a0 That evening, her mother disappears and, next day, Willa is left in charge of her kid sister, Elaine, while their father goes to work.\u00a0 Mrs Drake comes back quite soon, but the after-effects of this event will last a lifetime, engendering in Willa an expectation that it is the men in her life who will prove the more reliable.<\/p>\n

Ten years on, Willa accepts a marriage proposal, interrupting her promising college studies to move to San Diego with her boyfriend, Derek. \u00a0Twenty years on, now mother of two sons, she is abruptly widowed by a road accident.<\/p>\n

What follows is the history of Willa\u2019s bid for a quiet life that is also a caring one.\u00a0 In some ways, it is a tale of arrested development:\u00a0 in childhood, she had \u2018felt like a watchful, wary adult housed in a little girl\u2019s body\u2019; \u2018nowadays, paradoxically, it often seemed to her that from behind her adult face a child about eleven years old was still gazing out at the world.\u2019\u00a0 Her mother had always behaved wilfully, then sought forgiveness with disarming songs and smiles.\u00a0 Her husband had turned out to be rigid and unimaginative, quite unlike Willa\u2019s kindly father.\u00a0 By the time she acquires a second husband, Peter, her optimism has quite gone: \u2018Marriage was often a matter of dexterity, in Willa\u2019s experience.\u2019<\/p>\n

So, when a call comes for her to rescue the nine-year-old daughter of her son Sean\u2019s hospitalized ex-girlfriend, Willa goes –\u00a0 even though this means flying from Arizona to Baltimore, and dragging her reluctant husband with her.\u00a0 This journey pitches her into a chaotic new slice of family life which gives her an outlet and takes her mind off her own.<\/p>\n

This latest novel by the ever-popular Tyler goes down like a cool, refreshing drink, but not much more.\u00a0 An average American wife, weakened by early experience and then browbeaten by the men in her life, gets a late chance to do good and be kind and be thanked for it.\u00a0 It is a portrait of quiet stoicism, of weathering (like the saguaro cactuses of which she is so fond), with too many dull passages and not quite enough of interest in either the central or the surrounding characters to keep readers pinned to their chairs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

Her mother had always behaved wilfully, then sought forgiveness with disarming songs and smiles. Her husband had turned out to be rigid and unimaginative, quite unlike Willa\u2019s kindly father. By the time she acquires a second husband, Peter, her optimism has quite gone: \u2018Marriage was often a matter of dexterity, in Willa\u2019s experience’ […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7897"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7899,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7897\/revisions\/7899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}