I think Junior deludes himself about his feelings for Linnie. I agree with mathmom that he can handle himself work-wise: building a business, handling his finances during a hard time. He never would have returned for Linnie and feels pressured when she shows up. However, as time goes by, I think he loves her though he has no way of acknowledging that to himself. Linnie represents all he wants to leave in the past. However, just the fact that she gets away with throwing that blue paint down the walk says something. She has no fear of his reaction - and she’s right.
I like Linnie Mae. She knows herself and feels quite comfortable in her own skin. In Part One, Abby thinks back on the Linnie Mae she first met:
We don’t learn how perceptive Abby turns out to be until later in the book when we actually meet up with the force that is Linnie Mae.
I didn’t hate Junior. I think he loved Linnie and had a hard time admitting it to himself. She clearly would not have fallen apart without him but he used that to justify staying with her. I thought their story was the most interesting part of the book. I liked the story of how Junior manipulated the acquisition of the house and how Merreck followed in his footsteps to steal her best friend’s boyfriend. I live in Baltimore and, for years, lived in Anne Tyler’s neighborhood, Homeland. Halloween was huge in the neighborhood and she was usually home handing out candy to the kids. She was our celebrity. The neighborhood in which we lived is next to Roland Park, the neighborhood where the family lived. It is known for its stately Victorians. It was fun to read her descriptions of the neighborhoods, the stores where I shopped and streets I know so well. I also know the blue collar neighborhood well where Junior and Linnie lived - Hampden. I enjoyed the book but didn’t love it. I was relieved that I didn’t have to witness Abby sink into the despair of dementia.
^ Interesting! I’m sure knowing the area well adds another layer of enjoyment to the novel. I’ve never been to Baltimore, so it was all a bit fuzzy for me.
I think having children may have ramped up his efforts to improve his social standing, but it was a desire he had long before they were born:
My favorite was the blue paint. Way in the beginning there were refences as to how many times that walkway had been redone and then, finally, we know why. It was never right for Junior as he saw blue paint which meant imperfection and maybe feeling controlled. Betting Linnie never said a word no matter how many times that walkway was redone.
I think he did love Linnie but had no compass as his own mother died and given his life with brothers and a nasty father had never had the opportunity to love a female or to have been loved. He had no idea about it all.
About a week ago, HGTV had a trivia question " why are southern porches painted blue"
The answer - to ward off ghosts.
Ignatius, enjoyed your NPRlink to porch stories, especially liked the " son porch" which sounded so much like the Whitshank family story, “I do not know the future of my family home. My brothers and I are not in a position to take it when Mama downsizes. I dread the day that it must be sold, and I will miss the Son Porch more than any other part of the house.”
Cartera, Anne Tyler neighborhood resident, with memories of Anne Tyler handing out Halloween candy- love CC book discussions !
Linnie and Junior, never married. I missed that detail. We have family story like that, quite surprising to find out my grandparents never married. It happens.
Did Linnie splatter the paint, because she was upset about being forced to move from the neighborhood where she was accepted and had friends? Did she object to Junior’s need to be accepted by the Baltimore elite?
Or was the blue about their underlying power struggles, and unhappiness in their marriage?
I laughed when I read this. I so bet you’re right.
I noticed hints such as this scattered throughout the book - one of the things I enjoyed about it. I posted about Abby’s perception that Linnie has an awareness that goes unnoticed and later when the reader meets up with Linnie we understand.
SouthJersey: I think Linnie splatters the paint out of sheer irritation with the man. I don’t think she deals in deeper meanings.
P.S. Cross-posted with ignatius above! Linnie may not exactly obsess about the deeper meanings (the way Junior does, going over and over in his head what she might say or think), but I do think she exhibits passive-aggressive behavior (e.g., the no eye contact thing, which drives him nuts).
It’s nice to hear about Tyler’s Baltimore details being so meaningful and evocative to somebody who lived there. I lived near Baltimore in the 1970s and a few things in the book, like a certain department store name and some of the names of downtown streets, sparked memories in me.
I have to say, however, that Tyler made a couple of cultural/historical errors in the book.
(I know I’m perhaps unreasonably sensitive to things like this, but it’s difficult not to say anything about them!)
The first time Tyler mentioned Junior's acquisition of the house, she mentioned that the year was 1942 or 1943, yet she failed to address what the impact of WW II might have been on the owners' adult sons.
Tyler said that Merrick had been active in the Civil Rights Movement and had worn her hair in cornrows. Well, white women did not wear their hair in cornrows during the 1960s!! That came quite a bit later, in the late 70s, after Bo Derek popularized the look in the movie "10." (I'm certainly no expert, but I really don't believe that even black women wore cornrows in the 60s. They still straightened their hair, though many had started getting into wearing Afros.)
The dashiki! Dashikis did not have sleeves with elastic at the bottom. The sleeves were loose, and the fabric was generally an African pattern. White guys either seldom or never wore dashikis. (I wouldn't venture to say never, but the sight of a white guy in a dashiki back then would generally have caused raised eyebrows or induced snickers, and I don't think that was something that Tyler intended to imply about Red).
There was a resurgence of the popularity of cornrows, along with afros in the '60s. It was certainly mostly black women but I don’t think it is unbelievable that a young white woman would do it as a perceived show of solidarity for civil rights - particularly someone like Merrick, because it would be the least she could do.
^Thanks for that info, cartera45. I do think that Tyler was trying to indicate that Merrick was doing things that were somewhat typical for a certain type of young person in that era, and if Merrick had worn her hair in cornrows, she would not have been typical, but extreme.
Wait, it was Abby who plaited her hair in cornrows and marched for civil rights. The description was part of a passage that painted Abby as different from many of her peers - more artistic, earthy. She was an old hippie-type. I think Tyler was describing herself.
She spent years living in a Quaker commune in the mountains of North Carolina. Her parents were pacifists and civil rights activists. I read that she wanted to go to Swarthmore but her parents disagreed and she ended up at Duke, largely because of a full scholarship. I didn’t mean to suggest that Tyler actually wore cornrows but I think she identified with Abby and maybe that was something she could have seen herself doing in a different environment.
White is the traditional colour for West African weddings.[1] Most grooms wear white dashiki suits during wedding ceremonies. Some couples wear non-traditional colours. The most common non-traditional colours are purple and blue.
Purple and lavender: the colour of African royalty.[2]
Blue: blue is the colour of love, peace, and harmony.
My white father wore daishikis in the early 1970s to casual parties. Of course we were living in Tanzania at the time.
Corn rows I tend to agree - nearly all the African American girls I knew in high school wore Afros though a handful straightened their hair. I do remember one (white) girl in my class had put her hair into lots of little braids earlier in the week and had very frizzy hair for the class picture - I think her intention was to have more fullness. But she hadn’t braided it close to the head like real cornrows.
That would be Abby’s spool of blue thread, for sure. Her dream anyway, if not her reality.
Those were great links, ignatius! And NJTM, thank you for raising the questions. As I’ve said before, I tend to dive right into the “atmosphere” of a book without ever fact-checking, and often I’m the poorer for it. I would never have thought to look up either dashikis or cornrows, and now I am duly informed.
I laughed at the notion of Merrick as a social activist sporting cornrows. Definitely not her style.
Merrick is very much like her father, “studying how to rise above her origins” (p. 50). She sets a goal for herself (Trey) and achieves it, but it doesn’t make her happy. At least Junior got a quality house; Merrick did not get a quality husband.
What did you think of Merrick’s eulogy at Abby’s funeral? (“…I’m proud to say she was my closest, dearest friend” [p. 188]). Was it sincere? Might she have been a person who found it very difficult to show love (like her father)?
