Emotional ups and downs of getting married

By Philippa Tracy

Gail Baines is the narrator in Anne Tyler’s latest novel Three Days in June. She is 61 and an assistant head teacher at a private girls’ school in Baltimore. It opens with the Head telling Gail, unexpectedly, that she is about to retire and is clearly hoping Gail will do the same. The Head seems to think that Gail has a noticeable lack of people skills. I knew I would like Gail the minute she is told to be more diplomatic; she is asked to stop saying things to parents like, “Good God, Mrs. Morris, surely you realise your daughter doesn’t have the slightest chance of getting into Princeton.” Gail’s response immediately draws you in, as does her apparent lack of self-awareness.

The novel takes place over a weekend in June, as you might have guessed from the title. Gail’s daughter, Debbie, is getting married. Debbie’s father, and Gail’s ex-husband, Max, turns up for the wedding, with a stray cat, hoping to stay at Gail’s. The action takes place on the day before the wedding, the day of the wedding and the day after. Over the next 180 pages, we navigate, with Gail, the emotional ups and downs of the wedding preparations and anxieties, the shock revelations about the groom’s recent infidelity and Gail’s struggle with her memories of the breakdown of and fall out from her own marriage.

It is telling that Gail would rather cut her own hair than be forced to make conversation with the hairdresser. Having not been inside any kind of beauty salon since high school, she forces herself to make an effort for the wedding, only to endure the experience in total silence, then regret it. As Gail slowly reveals her worries for Debbie, as well as what went wrong in her own marriage, the reader cannot help but feel empathy for Gail’s concerns, along with her inability to express her feelings. It is clear that she and Max are cut from different cloth: “Boundaries; that was his problem. He lacked boundaries. I myself was all about boundaries.” Naturally, they cannot agree on how to advise their daughter on whether or not to go ahead with the wedding.

The characters are all intensely real and engaging. You feel you know them, and are willing them on to happiness, whatever mistakes they may have made in the past. They are written without judgement, with both insight and humour. Their memories come alive on the page. You live every moment of the relationships, the “ups and downs and icy silences and hurt feelings” and “married-couple conversations.” When Max talks about how they were once going to “grow old side by side,” the pathos is palpable. At a farewell lunch at the Cultured Crab, they eat rockfish and crab-and-rhubarb strata and talk about the previous three days as a kind of Groundhog Day, like the movie. Max believes they have, “been given another chance to get it right.” But have they?

Anne Tyler has been writing for more than 60 years. She has written much on the subject of love, marriage and family. Her first novel was published in 1964 and she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 for her novel Breathing Lessons. If you haven’t yet read any of her 24 novels, this is a good place to start.