The Clock Winder – Anne Tyler (1972)

The clock winder is the second Anne Tyler novel I’ve read for Liz’s read-a-long – I’m dipping in and out where I can. Anne Tyler is a consistently good writer; her characters emerge so realistically that the reader develops a relationship with them almost instantly. Despite that, there was something about this novel that slightly underwhelmed me – or perhaps I was affected by the rather melancholy tone that pervades the narrative. Either way, while I didn’t dislike the book, I wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as I was about If Morning Ever Comes back in January and felt and still feel I should have liked it much more. Looking back at this novel from a distance of two or three weeks, I realise that again it is a book that has really stayed with me. One thing I really did like particularly about the novel was the sense of time passing, lives shifting and changing. The story takes place over the course of a decade, chapter one taking place in 1960 and the final chapter in 1970.

This was I believe the first of Tyler’s novels to take place in Baltimore. Here, Mrs Pamela Emerson is living alone in her large family home surrounded by the clocks her husband used to wind. Newly widowed, and a little bit all at sea. One difficult morning, Mrs Emerson fires the handyman who has been with her for years, and almost on a whim hires passing stranger Elizabeth Abbot – who seeing her struggling to move some porch furniture stops and offers to help.

“From the day that Elizabeth first climbed those porch steps, a born fumbler and crasher and dropper of precious objects, she had possessed miraculous repairing powers; and Mrs Emerson (who had maybe never broken a thing in her life, for all Elizabeth knew) had obligingly presented her with a faster and faster stream of disasters in need of her attention.”

Elizabeth had been on her way to a job interview – a job she didn’t think she wanted anyway. Initially, Mrs Emerson is quite keen to employ Elizabeth as some sort of indoor maid but Elizabeth has no interest in such a role – preferring to be busy outside the house where she will be left to herself a bit more. Mrs Emerson gives in and employs Elizabeth as her new ‘handyman’ everyone delights in calling Elizabeth the ‘handyman’ seeing it as some huge joke. Elizabeth finds herself to be surprisingly practical and capable, and Mrs Emerson come to lean on her more and more. Elizabeth enjoys this new capability she sees in herself – perhaps unaware of how much she is becoming relied upon.

Mrs Emerson although living alone, has quite a brood of adult children. Two of her sons, are particularly frequent visitors in the early part of the novel. Elizabeth is drawn more and more – almost against her will into the everyday little domestic dramas of family life. There is for instance an amusing collusion over a turkey. In time, Elizabeth begins to grow closer to two of Mrs Emerson’s sons, Matthew, and Timothy. We sense the rivalry here may not end well. Anne Tyler’s drama does tend to be of the quieter and more domestic in nature, after all it is so often the small things that loom large in the lives of ordinary people. However, a terrible, shocking incident does occur within the family – one which Elizabeth is very much caught up in.

In the midst of a tragedy, the whole family gathers – but once the dust has settled a little, Elizbeth takes her chance to leave. Heading home to North Carolina and her religious family. Here she gets a job taking care of an elderly, frail man. Elizabeth finds she is good at caring for someone, soon she is being relied upon here too. Soon it is Elizabeth that old Mr Cunningham calls out for.

“Maybe she was the worst thing in the world for him. When she read aloud so patiently, and pulled his mind back to the checkers, and fought so hard against his invisible, grinning, white-haired enemy in the corner, it was all because of that worry. She was fighting for herself as well – for her picture of herself as someone who was being of use, and who would never cause an old man harm.”

Elizabeth’s absence from the Emmerson household is keenly felt and some members of the Emmerson clan seek to get her to return. During this period, the story moves forward in the letters various characters send to Elizabeth, and she writes in return. When Mrs Emmerson falls ill, it seems the time may finally have come for Elizabeth to return.

“Pianists, Matthew thought, are the ones that get arthritis, and artists go blind and composers go deaf. And his mother, who pulled all the family strings by words alone, was reduced to stammering and to letting others finish her sentences.”

What awaits Elizabeth in Baltimore and in those relationships she  built up a few years earlier remains to be seen.

As ever Anny Tyler’s world is one that is easy to slip into, her characters are so well drawn. The Emmerson household may not be one I would have wanted to spend time in myself – but I certainly felt that I ended up knowing them all quite well.