Character actors

Willa Drake’s second husband calls her ‘little one’, even though she is over 60 and the mother of two grown boys. After a troubled childhood in Lark City, Pennsylvania, she married at 21, stopped studying after her first pregnancy and was widowed with teenage children when her first husband was killed in a road-rage incident of his own making. Willa walked away from the crash physically unscathed: ‘She seemed to be in a kind of bubble, sealed away on her own.’ Late in life she suddenly decides the time has come to stop drifting, or going ‘at things so slantwise’. To her new husband’s bafflement, she responds to a random call for help after one of her son’s ex-girlfriends is shot in the leg in Baltimore. The ex-girlfriend, whom Willa has never met, has a young daughter who needs caring for while she is in hospital. Willa is not the girl’s grandmother, but wishes she was.

Clock Dance is structured as a series of flashbacks to the defining episodes of Willa’s life, which illuminate without explaining away her need to begin again. This is Anne Tyler’s 22nd novel. Like many of its predecessors, it concerns marriage, children, the passage of time and minute details of domesticity. ‘Any large “questions of life” that emerge in my novels are accidental,’ Tyler has claimed, ‘not a reason for writing the novel in the first place.’ The accidental question that emerges in Clock Dance is: can a child of whom too much was expected too young recover in adult life?

Soon after Willa arrives in Baltimore to look after Cheryl, the daughter of her son’s ex-girlfriend, she starts to reflect on her own childhood: ‘she’d felt like a watchful, wary adult housed in a little girl’s body’.