[Anne Tyler] writes of lonely, unhappy, confused individuals who seek meaning, comfort, and a bit of human understanding and contact. Her closest progenitor is Carson McCullers, but I find Miss Tyler's work to be more wistful, delicate, and touching.

In ["The Clock Winder"] one can not only witness and understand the incredible difficulty of human relationships but also the ambivalent burdens of family life. Parents cannot understand their children, and children cannot understand their parents. "Why," asks the aged Mrs. Emerson, "are my children always leaving?" and "Why are they always coming back?" Advancing age on all sides further complicates the situation. Miss Tyler has probed this puzzle maturely and carefully and continually conveys much of the mystery, the loneliness, and the aloneness of existence. Her art is quiet, delicate, sensitive, and acutely tender. She is not cheaply sensational and artifically flamboyant, and in this day and age...