‘Three Days in June’ by Anne Tyler (2025) – 176 pages
Anne Tyler is one of the main writers who got me attracted to fiction in the first place back in the early 1970s. After I read a couple of her novels, I went back and read everything she had written up to that point. Now, every few years, I return to one of her delightfully realistic novels, and I still get the same thrill I had gotten from them in the beginning.
As far as I know, every Anne Tyler novel takes place in Baltimore. Baltimore has become rather a mythical place for us readers where the residents are rather oddball but usually quite engaging.
“How we handle day-to-day life as we go through it, with its disappointments and its pleasures, that’s all I want to know,” – Anne Tyler, a Guardian interview
In ‘Three Days in June’, the daughter of Gail Baines is getting married in a very traditional wedding after the pandemic. I’m not sure that recent weddings have returned to the traditional form. The “three days” in the title are the day before the wedding, the day of the wedding, and the day after the wedding. Each day gets one chapter.
Gail’s ex-husband Max comes up for the wedding and stays with Gail. This would be unusual except in an Anne Tyler novel. Max is one of Tyler’s typical oddball-but-likeable male characters, scruffy and hapless but good-hearted. He brings a stray animal shelter kitten with him. Max is “the kind of man who would never ever in his life knowingly harm another person”.
What is exceptional about ‘Three Days in June’ for an Anne Tyler novel is that its theme is marriage infidelity, not Max’s but Gail’s.
“Why had I, who truly loved my husband – at least in the on-again-off-again, maybe-maybe-not, semi-happy way of just about any married woman – broken apart my whole world for a man I never really knew? But maybe that was just it: I hadn’t known him. There are times when that can be the strongest draw of all.”
As always, Anne Tyler brings a light touch to this story of marital unfaithfulness which is probably why she is underrated. Anne Tyler is never in her writing obscure. All of her fictional situations are as clear as a bell.
Perhaps the best style of all is no self-conscious style.
Grade: A
Tony's Book World 
Posted by kimbofo on March 12, 2025 at 9:02 AM
I love Anne Tyler for the same reasons you highlight here. I was introduced to her aged 17 when Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant was a set text in my final year of high school. I loved that book and later went on to read them all! Haven’t read this one yet, but it’s on my Wishlist!
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Posted by Anokatony on March 12, 2025 at 3:31 PM
Hi Kimbofo,
Yes, ‘Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant’ is one of Anne Tyler’s most famous. My first two Anne Tylers were ‘Celestial Navigation’ and ‘Searching for Caleb’. Those two got me hooked.
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Posted by Kat on March 13, 2025 at 1:45 AM
I loved this novel, too. She is a great writer, and also a comfort writer:, which is hard to balance for most writers. I always look forward to her books, and really should go back to her older books. We have a stack of mass market paperbacks of her early books.
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Posted by Anokatony on March 13, 2025 at 7:08 AM
Hi Kat,
Sometimes I think Anne Tyler gets dismissed as a great writer because she gets pigeonholed as a comfort writer. Tyler did make the Booker shortlist in 2015 and in 2020.
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