In novels like Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Breathing Lessons, Pulitzer Prize-winner Anne Tyler has displayed her mastery in creating slightly off-kilter but undeniably appealing characters whose flaws uncannily echo some of our own. In that sense, Three Days in June, her 25th novel, is certain to delight anyone looking to enter this familiar territory.
Like many of its predecessors, the novel is set in Baltimore, the city where Tyler has lived for some six decades. The principal characters in this brief but fully realized story are Gail and Max Baines, a divorced pair of educators reuniting temporarily to celebrate the marriage of their only child, Debbie. The wedding weekend comes at a moment of crisis in 61-year-old Gail's life, as she learns that the new headmistress at the private girls' school where she's worked for 11 years will be bringing her own assistant, which means that Gail won't be elevated to the top job as she had expected.
When Max arrives from Maryland's Eastern Shore, where he teaches at a school for at-risk teenagers, bearing the wrinkled khaki sports coat he plans to wear to his daughter's wedding along with a foster cat, his presence summons Gail's painful memories of the episode that led to the demise of their marriage. The passage of time clearly hasn't eased that pain. Still, Gail and Max are united by their love for Debbie, especially when a last-minute incident threatens to derail the wedding ceremony.
As the headmistress of Gail's school gently informs her, "social interactions have never been your strong point," while Max is an amiable, somewhat bumbling, man-child who once thought his ex-wife "hung the moon," even as she was never able to reciprocate that passion. More than a decade post-breakup, their relationship has settled into what Gail considers a "civilized friendship," but it's one tinged with regret for what might have been in the eyes of someone who once "truly loved my husband--at least in the on-again-off-again, maybe/maybe-not, semi-happy way of just about any married woman."
With a characteristic grace that combines economy of language and keen observation of the endearing oddities of middle-class American life, Tyler (The Beginner's Goodbye; A Spool of Blue Thread) guides the plot over some of the usual speed bumps that appear when not merely a couple, but their families along with them, are united by marriage. Three Days in June is a story about love in different forms, but at its heart it's a compassionate portrait of how muddling through may just turn out to be the path to happiness. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: This gentle story depicts how the wedding of their daughter allows one couple to come to terms with the events that ended their marriage.