Prospective readers of Anne Tyler’s twenty-second novel

(2018) may be somewhat curious about the significance of the title, although time travel has been a recurring theme in many of the author’s previous works. In this book, the “clock dance” is a step created by three elementary school-aged children, standing single-file with arms stretched out and waving up and down, much as the hands of an analog timepiece would move. If one assumes that some of the times represented in the dance would indicate hours and minutes that have passed, while others would correspond to a future time in the day, it is possible to extend that parallel to the novel’s content relative to Tyler’s existing oeuvre. In some ways,

goes back in time to

revisit familiar ground mined…

1139 words

Citation: Donohue, Cecilia. "Clock Dance". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 October 2019 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=39010, accessed 26 April 2024.]

• View recommended reading for this article