Beloved and prolific writer Anne Tyler returns with Three Days in June, a breezy family comedy. Easily digestible in a single sitting, the novel follows the misadventures of a mother-of-the-bride in the days directly before and after a fraught wedding.
Gail Baines is having a difficult time. She has just lost her job and is thrust into a weekend with her ex-husband as their daughter’s wedding draws closer. Gail’s social ineptitude renders her a lovable underdog protagonist as she wrestles with love, family and the true meaning of a ‘happy ending’.
Fans of Tyler will love this book. It carries all of the warmth and wry sense of humour that readers have come to expect, particularly from her later work. Like most of her fiction, the reader is presented with a multigenerational dysfunctional family. But, unlike 2020’s A Spool of Blue Thread or her earlier novels, much of the nuance is gone in Three Days In June, with characters artificially staged for situational comedy.Â
The novel has gentle, cynical humour, but the wedding setting means the comedy plays out with the clichéd tropes of a sitcom season finale. There’s a revelation of adultery, the expected awkwardness of separated family members reunited, and mishaps with hair and gowns. It’s achingly predictable.Â
It makes Three Days in June inoffensive but forgettable. Tyler is most interested in writing a farce, which she does with perfect competence, but she gives nothing new to the genre.
The staged nature of the dialogue is obvious enough that the manuscript may have started as a screenplay or theatre script. Characters speak asides aloud, under their breath, in every second scene – for no one else’s benefit except an invisible audience (the gift of the novel being, of course, that the reader can go inside the character’s thoughts).
Such traits give the dialogue a feeling of artifice, as Tyler prioritises a comic rhythm. Unfortunately, none of the comic beats are surprising enough to trigger the true belly laughs that are Tyler’s aim.Â
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Easy and gentle, Three Days in June is not Tyler’s finest book. At the age of 83, it’s also her 25th effort so she has more than earned her right to compose a light and breezy novel, having influenced so many other authors for decades.
Three Days in June, Anne Tyler
Publisher: Chatto & Windus (Penguin Random House)
ISBN: 9781784745752
Format: Hardback
Pages: 176hb
Publication: 11 February 2025
RRP: $32.99
