Thanks to e-reading everywhere I went, I finished Anne Tyler’s latest novel, Clock Dance. (As of this week, it begins to emerge on the NY Times Bestseller list.)
No doubt I’ll review it. For now, a selection of quotes. No one observes quite like Tyler.
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She yanked the closet door open and her reflection vanished.
“Hello?” he asked, in that reluctant, dread-filled voice he always used when he answered the phone, his second syllable trailing away as if he were already preparing to hang up.
Now she settled into the dailiness of grief- … the steady, persistent ache of it, the absence that feels like a presence.
She was the only woman she knew whose prime objective was to be taken for granted.
She had forgotten those whooshing pauses that happened during phone conversations with smokers.
She just loved saguaros, was all. …It felt like a cucumber, cool and smooth and sturdy. It seemed aware of her. She could almost believe it was steadying itself to receive the pressure of her hand.
(She had refused to ask her own seatmate. She didn’t like to discommode people.)
The dark was that half-hearted kind that happens on summer evenings…
It was, in fact, a bare-bones kind of house, its small rooms furnished sparsely, with pieces that seemed to have lead full lives in other houses long before this one.
… she’d felt like a watchful, wary adult housed in a little girl’s body.
And yet nowadays, paradoxically, it often seemed to her that from behind her adult face a child about eleven years old was still gazing out at the world.
Marriage was often a matter of dexterity…
Oh, already she was feeling the limitations of living out of a suitcase.
Now Willa remembered what a boon these young women could be; offering privileged glimpses into her sons’ private lives.
“If you don’t have grandchildren, you won’t have to worry about them going through the death of the planet.”
Home! Even the word was a comfort.
“….he thought it was impolite to pick up a telephone in mid-ring…”
