A suburb may be the whole world, in certain circumstances Tyler understands this, and conveys it, as she charts the course of this family story across time and space. There is no attempt to deliver a grand narrative of Baltimore writ large rather, we see the picture-window framing that represents what actual people living in a place experience. What I particularly like about Tyler’s writing of the city and its suburbs is her facility with the intimate. Baltimore is a character in this family story – a suburban, communal Baltimore, yes, but also a Depression-era, hard-edged, tough-times city. The reason? Well, there are two – one is The Wire, and the other is Anne Tyler.Ī Spool of Blue Thread, like most of Tyler’s novels, is set primarily in Baltimore, with occasional diversions. Yet, of all the places in the US I have never been, it sits alongside New Orleans as somewhere that lives in my subconscious, or at least a particularised version of it. Baltimore is a city that I have never visited, despite frequent trips to the US (from my Australian home) in the 1990s.
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