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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BEST SELLER * TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR USA TODAY * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: O Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Times (London)
A charming new novel of self-discovery and second chances from the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Spool of Blue Thread.
Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life. In 1967, she is a schoolgirl coping with her mother's sudden disappearance. In 1977, she is a college coed considering a marriage proposal. In 1997, she is a young widow trying to piece her life back together. And in 2017, she yearns to be a grandmother but isn't sure she ever will be. Then, one day, Willa receives a startling phone call from a stranger. Without fully understanding why, she flies across the country to Baltimore to look after a young woman she's never met, her nine-year-old daughter, and their dog, Airplane. This impulsive decision will lead Willa into uncharted territory--surrounded by eccentric neighbors who treat each other like family, she finds solace and fulfillment in unexpected places. A bewitching novel of hope and transformation, Clock Dance gives us Anne Tyler at the height of her powers.
Author Notes
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 25, 1941. She graduated from Duke University at the age of 19 and completed graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. Before becoming a full-time author, she worked as a librarian and bibliographer.
Her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964. Her other works include Saint Maybe, Back When We Were Grownups, Digging to America, Noah's Compass, The Beginner's Goodbye, A Spool of Blue Thread, and Vinegar Girl. She has won several awards including the PEN Faulkner Award in 1983 for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Accidental Tourist, and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons. The Accidental Tourist was adapted into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. In 2018 her title, Clock Dance, made the bestsellers list.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer winner Tyler (following A Spool of Blue Thread) takes a bittersweet, hope-filled look at two quirky families that have broken apart and are trying to find their way back to one another. Plaintive Willa is the link between her own fractured Pennsylvania family-rebellious sister Elaine, long-suffering dad Melvin, and "tempestuous" and abusive mom Alice-and that of lonely Baltimore single mom Denise and her precocious, love-starved daughter, Cheryl. The novel's first half follows Willa as she negotiates her troubled teenage years in the 1960s and her 20s and 30s in the '70s, her reluctant marriage to college sweetheart Derek, and her late-in-life second marriage with stuffy retiree Peter. The narrative then jumps to 2017, when Willa gets a breathless call to come to Baltimore to help take care of Cheryl, the young daughter of her son's recent ex-girlfriend, as Cheryl's mom, Denise, recovers from a mysterious shot in the leg. There, Willa settles amiably in a neighborhood of misfits, hooligans, and steely survivors-and explores her own family miseries. The cast of sharply drawn characters dominates in ways both reflective and raucous across a series of emotional events, such as Willa's baffling encounter with a would-be hijacker, a heartbreaking moment with her elderly dad, and the jolting advice she receives from a kindhearted doctor. It's a stellar addition to Tyler's prodigious catalogue. 250,000-copy announced first printing. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Tyler, a master of homey enchantment and sly social evisceration whose storytelling finesse has propelled more than 20 novels including A Spool of Blue Thread (2015) and her clever contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series, Vinegar Girl (2016) now delivers an especially lithe and enlivening tale. Willa Drake is a sensitive, patient, and determined 11-year-old in 1967, with a gentle father and a mercurial and wounding mother. In this ensnaring novel's first half, Tyler ticktocks through Willa's life as she becomes a college student, a wife and mother of two sons in California, a young widow, and a new wife to a golf-loving, semiretired executive in Arizona. Willa is neat, sweet, pretty, and gracefully acquiescent, until she receives a phone call from Baltimore, where Denise, a betrayed ex-girlfriend of Willa's older son, is in the hospital after an accidental shooting, leaving her young daughter and dog alone in their humble home. There is no tie between them, yet Willa feels summoned, and then, as she makes herself useful on a funky city block among motley, struggling, warmhearted neighbors, she feels needed. And liberated. Tyler's bedazzling yet fathoms-deep feel-good novel is wrought with nimble humor, intricate understanding of emotions and family, place and community and bounteous pleasure in quirkiness, discovery, and renewal. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Quintessential Tyler, this brilliant, charming, and book-club-ready novel of quiet transformation will be heralded with a major promotional campaign.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN 1986, Anne Tyler wrote an appreciation in this newspaper of one of her favorite childhood books, "The Little House," by Virginia Lee Burton. The book was a gift, she wrote, one she received in 1945 on her fourth birthday and has kept ever since. It tells the story of a house, built in the countryside but eventually engulfed by a burgeoning city, then moved, years later, to a new place in the country. Although the story is simple, Tyler wrote, "It seemed I'd been presented with a snapshot that showed me how the world worked: how the years flowed by and people altered and nothing could ever stay the same." This preoccupation with time - how people weather both the cruelty and the comforts of passing years - has long been a part of Tyler's work. Like the house in that children's book, her best characters have a way of revealing themselves through their steadfastness, even (or especially) during wrenching changes. For Willa Drake, first encountered as an 11year-old doggedly keeping things together through her mother's various dramatic exits from the family, an early marriage offers a chance to build her own, more solid, home life. It also forces her to cut short her education as she raises two sons; after enduring unpredictability as a child, she has tried above all "to be a good mother," Tyler writes, "which to her meant a predictable mother." In doing so, we realize when we meet Willa at 61, married the second time round to a semiretired lawyer, that she has become sadly predictable, even to herself. A stranger's phone call pulls Willa into a brand-new life. It turns out that the former girlfriend of one of Willa's sons has been injured and hospitalized, leaving no one to care for her young daughter. Scanning some numbers by the woman's phone, the stranger mistakes Willa for a grandmother of sorts. Lacking much of anything better to do, Willa decides to go for it. A good portion of Tyler's 22nd novel, "Clock Dance," takes place in Baltimore, the author's adopted hometown and one she's made use of in many previous novels, including 1988's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Breathing Lessons" and 2015's "A Spool of Blue Thread." Unlike in those books, whose characters mostly lived comfortably, here the setting itself is a little unsettled; Willa and her husband, Peter, arrive from their pristine Arizona retirement to a disheveled stretch of "small, dingy white houses with squat front porches, some of them posted with signs for insurance agencies or podiatry offices." The block, it soon becomes clear, is kind and quirky but a little off-kilter: a Baltimore neighborhood that could be the offspring of Mr. Rogers and John Waters. Here, in one of those little houses, live Denise (the former girlfriend), Cheryl (her daughter) and Airplane (yet another of Tyler's very real and lovable fictional dogs). Like Dickens, Tyler sketches a well-peopled larger community, bustling with friends, lovers and bit players. But the book's real action centers on Willa and how, in lending Denise and especially Cheryl some of her steadiness and predictability, she reclaims something of her younger self: a bolder, messier person than the superficial one she'd become, the "cheery and polite and genteel" woman who ended up living near a golf course and wearing expensive clothes. The title comes from a game Willa watches Cheryl and two friends playing: the girls' arms all arms of a human clock, ticktocking through a summer afternoon. In the world of children, and of a newly chosen family, Willa finds herself altered - or, perhaps, finds her unalterable self. Despite her many accolades, Tyler is sometimes dismissed for her books' readability, for their deeply familiar pleasures. And she can occasionally spout a cliché ("Sometimes Willa felt she'd spent half her life apologizing for some man's behavior"). However, it's usually the kind of line that's a cliché because it's true. When I told a friend I was reading Anne Tyler, she said, "Oh, my mother loves her books!" In the world of serious literature, this is not a raving endorsement. But, just like Virginia Lee Burton's "The Little House," the novels of Anne Tyler seem simple because she makes the very difficult look easier than it is. Her books are smarter and more interesting than they might appear on the surface; then again, so are our mothers.
Guardian Review
In the American authors 22nd novel, a woman in her 60s embarks on a whimsical mission but is it too late for freedom? It seems odd that the coming-of-age novel should still largely be confined to that time of life when youth passes into adulthood, when, for so many of us, the really interesting periods of revelation and maturation occur in later decades. Willa Drake, the heroine of Anne Tylers 22nd novel, leaves it particularly late: she is 61 when she embarks on a rather whimsical mission that will change her life. Willa is raised in the nothing-much town of Lark City, Pennsylvania, by a mother prone to emotional volatility and disappearances, with a feverish gaiety whose flip side is cruelty. Her father copes by smiling benignly; hes so mild-mannered that he considers it impolite to pick up a telephone mid-ring. As an adult looking back, Willa muses: It was marry such a person or be such a person. She opts for being such a person: a shadow, a pleaser, somewhat childlike in her ways, someone who refers to herself as a nervous Nellie and thinks of parallel parking as the back-and-forth thing. After her mothers erratic ways, Willa aspires to being predictable: She was the only woman she knew whose prime objective was to be taken for granted. She marries twice, the first time to her college boyfriend Derek, chiefly because he has had the gumption to stand up to her mother. Her plans to become a linguist fade and she ends up teaching English as a second language and raising their two sons. When the boys are in their teens and Willa is 41, Derek is killed in a car crash. (No spoiler here; this is on the flyleaf.) We dont much mourn his loss: his death occurs soon after we have met him, and what little we have seen of him leaves the impression of a rather shallow and irritating man. There is in the first section the seed of a wonderful novel, but its not the novel Tyler?goes on to write Readers might expect that this is the juncture at which Willa grabs hold of her life. Instead, the novel jumps ahead 20 years and we find her living in Arizona on the edge of a golf course with a second husband who is disappointingly similar to Derek. Peter is a tanned, trim, humourless man who has a habit of addressing his wife as little one. And then Willa gets the phone call that upends everything. A woman in Baltimore, whom shes never met, has found Willas number scrawled on a neighbours kitchen table. The neighbour, Denise, is the ex-girlfriend of Willas son, and shes been shot in the leg. There is no one to look after Denises nine-year-old daughter, Cheryl. The caller has mistakenly assumed that Willa is the girls grandmother, and Willa doesnt correct her. Next thing we know, Willa is on a plane to Baltimore, with Peter in tow. In zipping off to help Denise and Cheryl, she has responded to feeling needed again, after suffering from empty-nest syndrome. But what enables Willa to finally break free is the fact that she has decided to do a certain thing simply because it was something she wanted to do. As Denise recovers in hospital, Willa bonds with the precocious Cheryl, watching TV and taking the dog for walks. The neighbourhood characters in Baltimore are a motley crew of damaged but good-hearted misfits prone to homespun wisdom: Sometimes when Im feeling sorry for myself I widen out my angle of vision till Im only a speck on the globe, says one new friend. Its all a bit corny, but it gives Willa the juice she needs to make a change. For more than 50 years, Tylers fiction has focused on quiet lives and the seemingly minor moments that shunt people into new ways of thinking or being. She has won, or been shortlisted for, most of the major English-language literary awards. Clock Dance certainly begins promisingly. Its opening section, set in 1967 when Willa is a child, is its strongest. A white-knuckled calm pervades the household, an anxious sense of things poised to tip, at any moment, into violence or tragedy. The loneliness and confusion of childhood are wonderfully rendered. After their mother has gone missing, for example, Willa and her sister wait for the school bus, hugging their book bags for warmth and breathing out miserable rags of white air. This whole section is reminiscent of Tylers best work, such as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Unfortunately, the dark edge of Clock Dance s early pages soon gives way to a much more sentimental narrative. The most interesting characters in the book Willas troubled mother, and her girlhood friend Sonya, who winds up married too young and with a clutch of kids all but disappear. There is in that first section the seed of a wonderful novel, but its not the novel Tyler goes on to write. Instead, she gives us a story in which the characters too often cloy, and the stakes never feel high enough. When at last Willa does break free, its too little and too late. - Molly McCloskey.
Kirkus Review
After a lightweight foray into rewriting Shakespeare (Vinegar Girl, 2016, etc.), Tyler returns to her tried-and-true theme of family life's emotionally charged complexities.Eleven-year-old Willa Drake doesn't really understand the fraught interchanges between her volatile mother and maddeningly mild-mannered father that roil the novel's opening chapter, set in Pennsylvania in 1967. But as the action leapfrogs to 1977 and she impulsively decides to marry college boyfriend Derek after he stands up to her mother on their first meeting, we see that, in a world of self-dramatizers and placaters, Willa has unconsciously decided to be a placater. The chapter detailing Derek's death in a California road-rage incident in 1997 suggests that Willa's placatory pattern is firmly set, an impression buttressed as Part II begins with 61-year-old Willa now married to Peter, another man who patronizes her and expects her to cater to his every whim. But then comes a phone call from Baltimore, where her son's ex-girlfriend Denise has been hospitalized with a broken leg after a mysterious shooting incident by a neighbor under the mistaken impression that Denise's daughter is Willa's granddaughter. This brazenly schematic setup for Willa's late-life regeneration is redeemed by the fact that it's utterly characteristic of our maddeningly mild-mannered heroine that she not only doesn't correct the misunderstanding, but gets on a plane to Baltimore, with Peter in tow complaining all the way. Power dynamics are never simple in Tyler's portraits of marriage, and when Willa needs to, she quietly gets what she wants. As she gets to know Denise's prematurely mature daughter, Cheryl, and the array of eccentric folks on their slightly seedy blockall vibrantly portrayed with Tyler's usual low-key gusto and bracingly dark humorreaders will want Willa to see that others appreciate her sly wit and tolerant acceptance of people's foibles as whiny Peter does not. But will she? Tyler drags out the suspense a tad longer than the slight plot merits.More predictable and less profound than her most recent full-scale work (the magical A Spool of Blue Thread, 2015), but Tyler's characteristic warmth and affection for her characters are as engaging as ever. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Having survived an abusive mother and a father she compares to Gandhi, Willa Drake struggles to find meaning in a life without direction or purpose. She marries before finishing college and raises two sons before finally completing her degree. Her first husband is killed in a road rage accident just as her boys begin to exit into their own adult lives, and after marrying a second time, she ends up a golf widow in Arizona. Out of the blue, she receives a phone call about the ex-girlfriend of her older son, who has been shot and needs childcare for her nine-year-old daughter (not Willa's granddaughter). Soon, Willa finds herself in a closely knit, blue-collar Baltimore neighborhood. Welcomed by the people there, she discovers a little girl aching for a grandmother, a crying need in the community for her time and talents, and, finally, what's missing in her life. Pulitzer Prize winner Tyler (A Spool of Blue Thread) does not disappoint. Her characters are distinctly drawn and their stories layered like a Venn diagram over the central character. The result is a compelling look at the need for relevance, being offered a second chance, and deciding whether to take it. VERDICT Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 2/26/18.]-Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
2017 The phone call came on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-July. Willa happened to be sorting her headbands. She had laid them out across the bed in clumps of different colors, and now she was pressing them flat with her fingers and aligning them in the compartments of a fabric-covered storage box she'd bought especially for the purpose. Then all at once, ring! She crossed to the phone and checked the caller ID: a Baltimore area code. Sean had a Baltimore area code. This wasn't Sean's number, though, so of course a little claw of anxiety clutched her chest. She lifted the receiver and said, "Hello?" "Mrs. MacIntyre?" a woman asked. Willa had not been Mrs. MacIntyre in over a decade, but she said, "Yes?" "You don't know me," the woman said. (Not a reassuring beginning.) She had a flat-toned, carrying voice--an overweight voice, Willa thought--and a Baltimore accent that turned "know me" into "Naomi," very nearly. "My name is Callie Montgomery," she said. "I'm a neighbor of Denise's." "Denise?" "Denise, your daughter-in-law." Willa didn't have any daughters-in-law, sad to say. However, Sean used to live with a Denise, so she went along with it. " Oh , yes," she said. "And yesterday, she got shot." "She what?" "Got shot in the leg." "Who did that?" "Now, that I couldn't tell you," Callie said. She let out a breath of air that Willa mistook at first for laughter, till she realized Callie must be smoking. She had forgotten those whooshing pauses that happened during phone conversations with smokers. "It was just random, I guess," Callie said. " You know." "Ah." "So off she goes in the ambulance and out of the goodness of my heart I take her daughter back to my house, even though I don't know the kid from Adam, to tell the truth. I hardly even know Denise! I just moved here last Thanksgiving when I left my sorry excuse for a husband and had to rent a place in a hurry. Well, that's a whole nother story which wouldn't interest you , I don't suppose, but anyhow, I figured I'd be stuck with Cheryl for just a couple of hours, right? Since a bullet in the leg didn't sound all that serious. But then lo and behold, Denise had to have an operation, so a couple of hours turns into overnight and then this morning she calls and tells me they're keeping her in the hospital for who-knows-how-much-longer." "Oh, dear . . ." "And I'm a working woman! I work at the PNC Bank! I was already dressed in my outfit when she called. Besides which, I am not used to dealing with children. This has been just about the longest day of my life, I tell you." Willa had known that Denise was a single mother, although she'd forgotten how old the child was and she had only a vague recollection that the father was "long gone," whatever that was supposed to mean. Helplessly, she said, "Well . . . that does sound like a problem." "Plus also there is Airplane who I think I might be allergic to." "Excuse me?" "So I go over to Denise's house and check the numbers on the list above her phone--doctors and veterinarian and whatnot--thinking I will call Sean if I have to although everybody knows Denise wouldn't even let him back in the house that time to pack his things, and what do I see but where she's written 'Sean's mom' so I say to myself, 'Okay, I'm just going to call Sean's mom and ask her to come get her grandchild.' " Willa couldn't imagine why her number would be on Denise's phone list. She said, "Actually--" "What state is this, anyhow?" "Sorry?" "What state is area code five-two-oh?" "It's Arizona," Willa said. "So, do you think you could find yourself a flight that gets in this evening? I mean, it must be afternoon for you still, right? And I am losing my mind here, I tell you. I cannot wait to set eyes on you. Me and Cheryl and Airplane all three--we'll have our noses pressed to the window watching out for you." Willa said, "Actually, I'm not . . ." But this time she stopped speaking on her own, and there was a little pause. Then Callie let out another whoosh of smoke and said, "I live two doors down from Denise. Three fourteen Dorcas Road." "Three fourteen," Willa said faintly. "You've got my number on your phone now, right? Let me know when you find out what time you're getting in." "Wait!" Willa said. But Callie had hung up by then. Of course Willa wouldn't go. That would be crazy. She would have to call Callie back and confess she was not the child's grandmother. But first she spent an enjoyable moment pretending she might really do this. The truth was that lately, she had not had quite enough happening in her life. She and her husband had moved this past fall to a golfing community outside of Tucson. (Peter was passionate about golf. Willa didn't even know how to play.) She had had to leave behind an ESL teaching job that she loved, and she was hoping to find another one, but she hadn't exactly looked into that yet. She seemed to be sort of paralyzed, in fact. And Peter was out for hours every day with his golf chums, and her sons lived far away--Sean managing the Towson, Maryland, branch of Sports Infinity, Ian doing something environmental in the Sierra Nevada mountains--and both of her parents were dead and she rarely laid eyes on her sister. She didn't even have any woman friends here, not close ones. What would a person pack, she wondered, if this person were to contemplate making a trip to Baltimore? It would certainly not be a formal place. She tried to remember whether that A-line dress she liked to travel in was back from the cleaners yet. She went to her closet to check. By the time her husband returned from his game, she had a seat on the first available flight the next day. Excerpted from Clock Dance: A Novel by Anne Tyler All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
