Her style is mainly impressionistic, but includes one item in the picture rendered with photographic detail and precision that captures the aura of the house. Mercy goes into business painting house portraits. Tyler describes what she is attempting in this book through the artistic style of painting matriarch Mercy. Neither a saga nor a straight chronicle of the family’s life, French Braid presents a series of vignettes rooted in the point of view of one of the family members. Tyler introduces us to four generations of the Garrett family, a family that seems to have difficulty in holding together or appreciating each other.

With French Braid, Tyler intertwines the theme of taking people seriously with a portrait of family life, because she knows that to be the primary context where we are measured as either serious or, the true opposite of serious, shallow. Beloved by an audience that vociferously demands that her sharp-eyed, grace-filled style be acknowledged among the greatest authors of the age, she is arguably the middlebrow champion of the world. Tyler is perhaps, by reputation, a perfect author to consider such a theme.

Anne Tyler’s twenty-fourth novel, French Braid, places this theme at the center of a story tracing four generations of a family across the course of sixty-one years. Whether you deal in the old money of ‘compulsions… robed as destinies’ or the crypto-currency of being ‘seen’, it is a universal human desire to be taken seriously. Shepherding a Family From Shallow to Seriousīuy Now:

The french braid anne tyler