It’s the day before her daughter’s wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines. First, she loses her job – or quits, depending who you ask. Then her ex-husband Max turns up uninvited at her door planning to stay for a couple of nights, bringing with him memories, a shared sense of humour, comfortable companionship, and a random cat looking for a new home.
Just as Gail is wondering what’s next, their daughter Debbie discovers her groom has slipped up in the month before the wedding. Or has he? Will this derail everything for the happy couple? And what is ‘a happy couple’ anyway?
Following the thoughts of the mother of the bride, Anne Tyler’s latest book is a delightful excursion into the lives of these three everyday characters as they quietly negotiate life over just three days. But don’t be fooled by the small-scale suburban backdrop and the commonplace matters at hand. In less than 200 perfect pages, Tyler covers large issues of life, and delves deep into the human condition. There’s marriage, what it means, and what comes after; there’s love; fidelity, fear, a leap of faith, and a gamut of very human emotions we might admit only to ourselves. For Gail, for example, an insidious insecurity, and the worry of being usurped in Debbie’s affection by the shiny new Mother-in-Law, triggers a jealousy she finds hard to keep in check.
Most mothers are worriers: that’s a big part of motherhood, and it doesn’t stop when your children reach adulthood.
“Good grief! Do you keep an itemized list of things to worry about?” asks Max.
For Gail, who is a little socially inept at the best of times, it’s hard to know what to say to her daughter for fear of getting it wrong, even if her daughter wanted to listen. “I’d been scared of the wrong thing, it turned out,” she muses insightfully. “Not that Debbie would marry Kenneth even after he’d [possibly] betrayed her, but that she would take his word for it when he claimed he hadn’t.” And then ask yourself, how brave would it be to tell your daughter not to marry a wrong’un on the morning of the wedding? Yet could you live with yourself if you didn’t?
As you’d expect from Tyler, Three Days in June is packed with many understated moments of real wisdom, and here ‘Someday I’d like to be given credit for all the times I have not said something that I could have said,’ strikes home!
Gail’s story illustrates beautifully how your adult children’s choices may – unbeknown to them – be baffling and concerning; how mothers suffer a lifelong mix of heartbreak with their joy as they watch their children spread their wings in the big bad ordinary world. And when ‘children veer out from their parents like so many explorers in the wilderness,’ a wedding is surely one of the biggest steps?
‘Could I have this dance, for the rest of my life? What a cataclysmic question, when you stopped to think about it. I wondered how it was that anyone on earth ever found the courage to marry,’ thinks Gail. Yet like the unsolicited cat, weaving in and out around the ankles of this smooth narrative, perhaps it isn’t always hard to choose when to stay.
An interesting counterpoint, is the relationship between Gail and her ex-husband, the determinedly pleasant Max, which illustrates the surprising fondness a divorced couple can share after ‘many years of ups and downs and icy silences and hurt feelings.’ Never underestimate the humble strength of pleasant.
This charming novel – my favourite of Anne Tyler’s to date, and which I devoured in an afternoon -resounds with quiet domesticity, gentle love, wry humour and sharp observations.
With a choice at its heart that perhaps isn’t as big as it seems, and an ironic twist in the tale, Three Days in June is a heart-warming read. It also has something to teach us all, including that you should never underestimate either your children or your parents.
Anne Tyler: Three Days in June is now available in bookshops across Malta.
