Tyler’s characters, the Whitshanks live in Baltimore and are much preoccupied with their own family dynamics. It recycles virtually every theme and major plot point she has used in the past and does so in the most perfunctory manner imaginable. Tyler’s latest novel, “A Spool of Blue Thread,” unfortunately falls into that category. Her lesser books, like “A Patchwork Planet” and “Noah’s Compass,” stumble into predictability and cliché. Her best work - like “The Accidental Tourist,” “Breathing Lessons” and the ambitious “Digging to America” - gives us intimate portraits of middle-class life, tracing the centrifugal and centripetal forces of family that can propel individuals outward into the world at large or hold them close at home. Anne Tyler’s novels tend to walk a narrow line between the moving and the sentimental, the sympathetic and the maudlin, the evocative and the banal.
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