Three Days in June: A Novel
“Tyler moves the chess pieces, or those figures on top of the wedding cake if you’d prefer, with aplomb. And Baltimore has never looked better.”
Just as William Kennedy was the mature voice of Albany, so Anne Tyler is to Baltimore—still her place of residence at 83. The good news is that Tyler has lost none of her power to enchant, and she’s probably done more to inspire visits to the port city than a full year’s worth of press releases.
Tyler didn’t actually grow up in Maryland; her formative years were spent in a Quaker community in the hills of North Carolina, then Raleigh to attend Duke. Baltimore happened around 1967 because her Iranian psychiatrist husband (who is also a novelist) got a medical posting there. She was 10 books in before The Accidental Tourist won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985, and then the 11th, Breathing Lessons, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989.
Baltimore is once again the backdrop for Three Days in June, and up close we have Gail Baines, the day before her daughter’s wedding, being told by her boss that a) she’s not getting that long-anticipated promotion; and b) she’s actually fired. Being headmistress of a school for rich kids requires “people skills,” and Gail is told that “social interactions have never been your strong point.”
Well, maybe they’re not, and Debbie, the daughter, would probably agree. But at least she’s more functional than ex-husband and father-of-the-bride Max, who arrives for the nuptials with no place to stay, no proper clothes, and an elderly cat (in mourning for its late owner) who’s likely to send the deathly allergic groom to the hospital before the ceremony can even begin.
Tyler’s book is aptly named. Just as some films—some pretty darned good ones—proceed in an orderly, compressed timeline, so does this novel. Before the wedding, the wedding, after the wedding. And it’s all good, because Tyler is a master of character and dialogue, especially among the long-married (even if they’re divorced). There’s a crisis or two along the way—of course there is. Relatively small ones, plus one big one.
Do you buy this explanation as to why groom Kenneth went off, for an inordinate time just before the Big Day, with Carla, decidedly not the bride? “It turns out this Carla got food poisoning,” Max explains. “Everybody was at some party. Kenneth and his sister and I don’t know who all from their high school days, and Carla felt sick and so [Kenneth] drove her home and stayed to feed her ice chips until she felt better.”
In weddings, it’s always something. In Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize), the titular insect attacks the bride on the way to the ceremony. Here, Gail tells Max, “Guess what: Bitsy has hives.”
“Hives!”
“She thinks it’s something she ate last night.”
“What a pity,” I said. “Deb—”
“Maybe the pineapple in the chicken dish, she thinks.”
I forced myself to consider the subject at hand. I said, “Can she still be in the wedding?”
She can still be in the wedding, but her face will scare small children, she says.”
Meanwhile, that darned cat is rubbing itself up against everybody, and getting dangerously close to Kenneth.
Weddings make for great drama, which is why Father of the Bride went from 1949 bestseller to hit film with Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, and Elizabeth Taylor (1950) to remake (1991) with Steve Martin and Diane Keaton. Max is the father of the bride here, but no way he’s paying for the wedding.
Tyler moves the chess pieces, or those figures on top of the wedding cake if you’d prefer, with aplomb. And Baltimore has never looked better.