Three Days in June by Anne Tyler [5/10]

Beloved novelist of quotidian days in Baltimore, Anne Tyler cannot be resisted, always parses smoothly, but increasingly has become insubstantial. In Three Days in June, deputy principal Gail, a fastidious, locked-up personality with a heart of gold well hidden, wrangles the world on the day before her sole daughter’s wedding (assailed by the arrival of her messy, friendly ex-husband Max), during the wedding, and on the day after. The novel starts encouragingly and inserts shocks as we realize the underlying theme is marital infidelity, but then the author seems to run out of puff. The chaotic wedding, viewed satirically, becomes tedious and just when the aftermath day picks up speed, Three Days in June climaxes with a genteel twist that might not ring true (at least it didn’t to this reader). Tyler’s twenty-fifth novel is, at 176 pages, short and slight.