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4.5
Tyler’s characters often appear, at first, that they are shallow and lacking in substance.This is a trademark technique of Tyler. In this heartfelt novel, we meet Willa Drake, an eleven-year-old living in Pennsylvania with her dysfunctional family. She was the “good one,” attempting to mollify her abusive mother, solicitous to her younger sister and obedient to her submissive father. We follow her to the next decade where she decides to marry an aggressive college boyfriend, Derek. She wasn’t sure she wanted to marry him; she had education plans; she had smarts and talent. But he stood up to her parents and so, in a titanic act of defiance, she marries, gets pregnant, and doesn’t finish college.All this time, Willa acquiesces to Derek until her life changes in middle age with a road rage accident. Her two sons, Seth and Ian, are quite different from each other. I expected them to dote on kind Willa, a predictable mother, but Tyler surprised me with their disengagement from her.Spontaneity is not one of Willa’s characteristics. Wllla remarries a supercilious attorney, Peter. I’m not sure what Willa was looking for; she did not need to marry for money. The novel becomes a bit bizarre, but not uncommon for Tyler. She receives a confusing phone call from an oddball neighbor of her son Sean’s ex-girlfriend, Denise, asking for Willa to take care of Cheryl, Denise’s daughter, because Denise has been accidentally shot. Willa, with Peter in tow, flies from Arizona to Baltimore. At sixty-one years old, the reader, no doubt, realizes how lonely and desperate Willa has become.The rest of the novel involves a Dickens-like setting with a lower middle-class group of people. Denise is not easy to like. Willa is rather subservient to this group but Cheryl stands out as a bright, sweet, helpful child. She is the only really lovable character in the novel. She seems to be a young Willa, full of plans and intelligence. It is an odd situation, Willa so obliging to everyone, her words are measured. So, what are we seeing? I found Tyler’s main theme through a secondary character, Mrs. Minton, who explained that one had to find out what is there to live for?Willa’s slow evolution in somewhat painful, and I became angry with her timidity and her treatment by others, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We need to carve out what we need and make it work somehow.
