There’s a scene near the end of Anne Tyler’s new novel, Three Days in June, where the two main characters, a divorced middle-aged couple named Gail and Max, compare their lives to the movie Groundhog Day, “where people live through the same day over and over until they get it right”, Gail reminds him. “Wouldn’t it be great if the world worked that way?” says Max. Instead, Tyler’s novels are records of the numerous ways people get things wrong and learn to live with it, and how the wrong things have a sneaky habit, eventually, of turning out to be right.
Take Gail and Max, who are familiar types from Tyler’s work. She is an orderly worrier, a little abrupt, “right-angled”, who cuts her own hair for fear of the chitchat she gets in the salon. Max, on the other hand, is a big, messy, boundaryless but kind-hearted man who generates “hillocks of clutter” wherever he sits. They could represent the twin impulses – of connection and withdrawal – that have lapped at Tyler’s novels like the tides eroding and shaping a coastline. Though they divorced many years before, Max and Gail have been brought together by the wedding of their 33-year-old daughter, Debbie. The day before the wedding, Max turns up at Gail’s house in the outskirts of Baltimore with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder and an old cat in need of a home, and at first, Gail is of a mind to put neither of them up. “I didn’t even want a house plant. I had reached the stage in life where I was done with caretaking.”
But Max is covered in dander and the groom is allergic to cats, so stay with Gail he must. Tyler gets much gentle comedy from the way Gail is both irritated by and drawn to her ex-husband, who nibbles at everything in the fridge, parks his car too close to hers and leaves the front door open, but also helps her negotiate what turns out to be a rocky few days as a bombshell strikes: news of a recent infidelity rocks the bride-to-be on the eve of her wedding. Max is ready to take his cue from whatever their daughter has decided but Gail is up in arms about it, for reasons that have to do with the end of her own marriage, we find out. Form follows emotional function, as always in Tyler’s books. A hiccup in the wedding plans of their daughter proves the perfect place for all the unresolved feelings around Gail and Max’s own abruptly truncated marriage to pool.
At just 176 pages, Three Days in June is, if not her shortest, then a return to the more attenuated form of Tyler’s early novels, before she unfurled those big, capacious 400-pagers about Baltimore families – Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist, Saint Maybe – that proved Tyler’s mastery. The sprawl and spread of family life appears to have undergone the abbreviation of form that comes with the empty nest, but Tyler’s powers of observation, empathy, wit and depth of insight have suffered no attendant diminution. Three Days in June takes two days to read, but it envelops you just the same, her characters so alive they could be sitting next to you telling you what happened to them last Tuesday – and the ending is a beauty.
Given how much she has written about marriage, it is perhaps surprising that Tyler has not written more frequently about infidelity – certainly, she lacks the heavy-breathing obsession that male counterparts such as John Updike and Philip Roth brought to the subject – but it is typical that the guilty party in Max and Gail’s marriage was unable to live with themselves, rather than the other way around. Otherwise, Max and Gail seem to fit together so well that, by the end of the book, you are willing them back together with your every fibre – though Gail might still end up with just the cat. It says everything about Tyler’s talents as a novelist that both outcomes are equally plausible and equally possible, until the very last word of the very last sentence of this wise, wonderful book.
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler is published by Chatto & Windus (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
