From here, she unspools the ordinarily extraordinary story of a family who live in one house over several generations. It is part of a spooled family history the place where Tyler takes up a thread that runs forward and as well as back. This episode isn’t the beginning of the story, or the end, or, in any clearly defined way, the middle. Later, learning second-hand that he has dropped out of college, Abby thinks ‘Denny had withdrawn he was withdrawn he had withdrawn from the family years ago’. It ends badly, with a loss of contact which wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last.

Someone contemplates a blue paint stain on a pathway and imagines that it won’t ever come out without digging it up and starting over again ‘the walk would be marked indelibly, engraved with Swedish blue for all time’.Īs the novel opens, Red and Abby Whitshank receive a call from Denny, their most unreachable, unruly son.

More than one character examines the growth rings of a tree and family stories and traditions are told, retold and mulled over. Questions about how the past can shape the present, or whether it can ever really be shrugged off, are threaded throughout the book. As an object within the novel, it is a ball of thread used to mend wedding clothes to be worn at a funeral, a potent and ambiguous souvenir which, like Tyler’s novel, brings past and present together in unexpected and sometimes troubling ways. It doesn’t quite have the doubleness of its near synonym, ravel – a word which means both to come apart and be put back together again – but it hints at things that have come asunder being wound back into place. Spool is a tricky word, both noun and verb, which contains a tangle of meanings.

A spool of blue thread review