Tyler, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize whose books have twice received nominations for the Man Booker Prize, has created a distinguished literary career using much of the same characterizations and settings that are in evidence in French Braid. She is renowned for her short fiction as well as for her novels, and French Braid is notable for drawing on both literary forms, in that each of the eight chapters is set in a different chronological era, sometimes decades apart, and often focuses on a different protagonist. While the lengthy scope of the narrative implies a changing group of characters, the profound themes at work from the inception of the family remain present throughout each chapter.

In all her literature, Tyler focuses on relationships and, more specifically, on how they often do not function properly, failing to live up to the expectations and needs of the people involved. The seemingly perpetual conflict between women and men in various relationships is most obviously on display in the enduring distance between Mercy and Robin, to which Robin remains oblivious. Nearly all Tyler’s male-female relationships exhibit conflict, which she portrays sometimes explicitly and sometimes subtly. The pervasive element of conflict draws attention to those couplings that really do seem to work, such as the marriage of

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