Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

Reviewed by Harriet

‘You know I’m not a huge cat fan. I’ve always thought they were cold-hearted’. 

‘Cats are not cold-hearted’, I said. ‘They’re only protecting their dignity in case they get rejected. “I’ll just reject you first”, they’re saying’. 

Three Days in June is Anne Tyler’s twenty-fifth novel. Her first, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964 when she was twenty-three – she’s said since she’d like to burn it together with her other early works. She really came into her own in the 1980s with some big successes: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Breathing Lessons. Almost all her subsequent novels have been best sellers and won prizes, though not yet the Booker, though she’s been shortlisted once and longlisted once, and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2011. We’ve reviewed three of her novels on Shiny [here], and it’s with great pleasure that I’m reviewing her most recent one.

Gail Baines is sixty-one and, as the novel starts, has just learned that her expected promotion to head of the school where she’s already deputy-head will not be happening as a younger candidate has been selected – one who, as her boss points out,  has the tact and people-skills that Gail lacks. Extremely miffed, she walks out, deciding she will never return. Now she has to get through the next three days: her daughter’s wedding rehearsal that same evening, the wedding day, and the undoubtedly difficult day after, when she’s certainly going to feel bereft after saying goodbye to her only child. And to cap it all, her ex-husband Max turns up, bringing his cat, which won’t be welcome at Debbie’s in-laws, where he’d been planning to stay, as his son-in-law to be has a serious -‘deathly’ – allergy. So rather reluctantly, Gail agrees to let them both stay in her house. But Max and Gail have been divorced for twenty years, so how will this turn out?

In this delightful, moving, perceptive 176 page novel, the reader gradually learns more about Gail herself, initially not an easy task as she’s the narrator, and it takes a while to see through her wry, somewhat cynical view of the world. She’s very self-protective, and very buttoned-up: when her boss tells her she can now do things she’d ‘always dreamed of’, her response is that she’s ‘not the sort of person who dreams of doing things’. But she and Max manage to rub along through the three days, although Gail is still irritated by Max’s relaxed, accepting view of the world. This does cause them to disagree violently about the correct response to a revelation about Debbie’s forthcoming bridegroom. Considering Max’s laid-back reaction to this revelation, it’s easy to conclude that their marriage had foundered owing to something Max had done. So when, a fair way into the novel,  Gail confronts the true reason for their break-up, it comes as quite a surprise, and reveals a new side to both Gail and Max.

Tyler’s novels almost invariably centre on family dynamics, whether between husbands and wives, parents and children, or siblings, and she has an astonishing ability to understand the subtleties and intricacies of their inter-relationships. When asked in 2013 about her approach to writing,  she said:

I do make a point of writing down every imaginable facet of my characters before I begin a book, trying to get to know them so I can figure out how they’ll react in any situation … My reason for writing now is to live lives other than my own, and I do that by burrowing deeper and deeper … till I reach the center of those lives.

You might think that after sixty years of doing this she might be slowing down but clearly that is far from the case. As she told an interviewer for the Sunday Times a few years ago, she still thinks: ‘What exactly am I going to do with my life? What is my career going to be? I’m only 80, for God’s sake!’

Novelist John Boyne called Tyler ‘the greatest living novelist’. Of course that’s debatable, but I’ve loved everything of hers I’ve read, and this one is no exception. I’m not ashamed to tell you I cried at the end, and she keeps you on tenterhooks guessing what that will be right up to the final line. 

Oh yes, and that cat – the lines I quoted at the beginning come very close to the end of the novel, and it’s not hard to see that Gail – once not very fond of cats – has recognised something in the animal’s character that she’s finally come to acknowledge asa trait she herself has always shared.

Harriet is a co-founder and one of the editors of Shiny.

Anne Tyler, Three Days in June (Chatto & Windus, 2025).  978-1784745752, 176pp., hardback.

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