The best way to write a novel is to pretend no one will read it

She smiled. “I’ve never been as intelligent as I was at seven. I have never been as thoughtful or as introspective.”

As a child she read a lot — sometimes books such as Little Women over and over again — but even in high school it never occurred to her to be a writer, because she was assigned books such as Silas Marner, and Julius Caesar and she knew she could never write like that. When she was 14, she had a revelation when she read Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green and Other Stories.

“I was handing tobacco in the summers,” she recalled, explaining that her job was passing tobacco leaves to someone who tied them on sticks for curing. “The stringer was always a black woman, the handers were mostly farm wives and a few teenaged girls. And they talked, talked, talked. It was a real education. I’d go home every night and my arms would be covered in tar up to my elbows, which tells you something.

“I realised the people Welty was writing about were country people just like the people I was handling tobacco with. I was just flabbergasted. I said, she’s writing my life, people I know, and it’s not Shakespearean English. She’s just telling what’s real out there that she sees. Later I even got to know her. She was like her stories. There was something wondering about her as she spoke, as if she was marvelling at everything she looked at.”

Welty notwithstanding, Tyler went to Duke University and majored in Russian, not because of any particular interest in that language or its literature, but because she “just wanted to do everything different from my parents”.

“I still had no intention of becoming a writer,” she recalled. “I had a series of really good high school English teachers, then an English professor at Duke, and then Reynolds Price, who taught writing there, and every single one of them would say, you’re really good, you ought to be a writer, and I’d just say OK. I wanted to be an artist, though it’s just as well I’m not. I honestly sometimes think to this day, I wonder what I’m going to be?”

Baltimore was also unplanned. Tyler moved there from Montreal in 1967 because her husband, Taghi Modarressi, an Iranian child psychiatrist, was offered a job at a hospital there, and at first she hated it. “Now I don’t know where else I would live. It’s a very kindhearted city, friendly and gentle. That sounds ironic to say but it’s true.”

Almost all her books have been set there, so that by now her Baltimore has become a sort of urban Yoknapatawpha. For the most part the Baltimore she writes about — a place part real, part imaginary — could not be less like the neighbourhood she actually lives in. The Baltimore of Tyler’s novels is mostly middle class, or even working class — a place of crowded streets and small houses whose first stories sometimes double as offices for podiatrists and insurance agencies, and where people are probably a little kinder than they are elsewhere.

“I never consciously decided that from now on I’ll just write about Baltimore,” she said. “Part of it is just laziness — it’s a lot easier to set a story in the place where you live. Part of it is admiration. I like the grit and character. If I’m in the supermarket and hear two women talking, I’ll be kind of making notes in my mind. It’s a very catchy way of speaking, the way Baltimoreans speak.” (In her new book, someone unused to the accent thinks that one of the characters is named Sir Joe — until it turns out he is really Sergio.)

Clock Dance, Tyler’s fans will mostly be relieved to know, is hardly a departure. It is almost a compendium of familiar Tyler tropes and situations. It mostly takes place in Baltimore, though the main character is not from there.

There is a difficult mother and some estranged siblings, just as in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant; a marriage of mutual (and perhaps deliberate) misunderstanding, as in Breathing Lessons; and, above all, a curious exploration of what it means to be part of a family. Some of the characters watch a TV show called Space Junk, which is practically an emblem of the novel; it is about some aliens who kidnap random earthlings on the assumption that they must be related and then try to figure out why they behave the way they do.

“Every time I begin a book I think this one is going to be completely different, and then it isn’t,” Tyler said. “I would like to have something new and different, but have never had the ambition to completely change myself. If I try to think of some common thread, I really think I’m deeply interested in endurance. I don’t think living is easy, even for those of us who aren’t scrounging. It’s hard to get through every day and say there’s a good reason to get up tomorrow. It just amazes me that people do it, and so cheerfully.

“The clearest way that you can show endurance is by sticking with a family. It’s easy to dump a friend, but you can’t so easily dump a brother. How did they stick together, and what goes on when they do? — all those things just fascinate me.”

She has no plan to retire. “What happens is six months go by after I finish a book,” she said “and I start to go out of my mind. I have no hobbies, I don’t garden, I hate travel. The impetus is not inspiration, just a feeling that I better do this.

“There’s something addictive about leading another life at the same time you’re living your own.” She paused and added, “If you think about it, it’s a very strange way to make a living.”

New York Times

Clock Dance is published by Vintage at $32.99.