Three Days in June by Anne Tyler review: 'intelligent and sympathetic'

She never shows off. Her books are intelligent and sympathetic. Set in Baltimore, they may seem to some rather old-fashioned. Her characters belong to the middle-class; here the chief ones are school-teachers. Family structures may may not be as strong as they were a couple of generations ago, but they still matter. Marriage is important, not something to be rushed in to.

Here we have a story covering three days: before the wedding, then the wedding, then the days after. Tyler gets a lot into these three days for she lops back 30 and more years in the memory of her heroine, Gail, a later-fifty something mother of a single child, Debbie, the bride to be.

Everything in the story is seen from Gail’s point-of-view, and she is good, if sometimes irritating, company; irritating to other characters too. She is not at all sure about Debbie’s choice of husband. Is he to be trusted? Also, since his family is richer than Debbie’s, will marriage take her away from Gail.

Gail is difficult. We learn this immediately. Second-in-command at her school, she will not take over when the headmistress has an operation likely to lead to retirement. The matter is put squarely to her: she lacks “people skills”. Perhaps so, we may conclude. Yet she is likeable herself, though sometimes tiresome.

It’s not just the accusation that she lacks people skills that has her on edge. There’s her ex-husband Max, a school teacher like herself. They’ve been divorced for years, but now he is coming to stay with her over the three days. He is irritating, slow, badly dressed, gets on her nerves. Worse he has brought a cat and she thinks she doesn’t like cats.

Then she doesn’t trust the groom, Kenneth. She fears she will lose Debbie – Kenneth’s family are richer than she is, more sociable too. She is sure Kenneth has already been unfaithful to Debbie and would like the marriage to be called off, but can’t bring herself to say so frankly.

How will it all work out over the three days: the Day of Beauty (ghastly expression) the wedding rehearsal, the marriage itslef and what follows. It’s disturbing that the morning after the wedding, Debbie calls Kenneth’s parent first to say "thank you". Max, stolid clumsy Max, puts her gently right about that.

Though the immediate action is confined to the three days, the novel tracks back in time, as Gail recalls her life with Max, Debbie’s childhood, and importantly, an affair she had for a short time with a colleague, a memory that still disturbs her, though it doesn’t incline her to be more understanding of Kenneth’s presumed pre-marital lapse.

Part of Tyler’s masterly understanding of her characters – and indeed of human nature – is her fairness, her generosity of spirit. She is indignant when accused of lacking people skills – who wouldn’t be? – but Tyler while showing that the charge is indeed just, nevertheless Gail is also admirable and, one finds, likeable. This is as something that takes skill to bring off.

In general the characters in Tyler’s novels are sympathetic because they are understood and treated fairly.

Her novels are domestic studies, studies in human nature and conduct. They are never showy, never flamboyant . They are old-fashioned in their subject-matter – middle-class family lives – and the apparent ordinary characters and situations. She is concerned with how people should behave to others, with their lapses but also, importantly, their decency. She never pretends that even apparently comfortable lives d are easy. At the same time she is often very funny. Fair enough, life, as presented in her elegant novels, though often painful and disturbing, is more comedy than tragedy.. She has written almost thirty novels all the twenty or so I have read are good. They have tradition virtues, absent from much fiction today: a serious there, lightened by comedy, seriousness, truth to life as commonly experienced, intelligence and an admirable economy.

Three Days in June, by Anne Tyler, Chatto & Windus, £14.99