wouldn’t trust your purse with for five minutes, maybe, but still they put in years and years of time tending their children along.” Tyler, in her subsequent 15 novels, has continued to focus on the ties that push apart and pull together family members, though her definition of “family” includes any group of people that live closely together. Reviews Jonathan Yardley acknowledges The Clock Winder’s flaws: “Its shape is a little loose, some of the secondary characters never quite come into focus, and one wants to know a bit more about the husband whose death sets all these events in motion than is doled out in one long paragraph.” As a novelist who prides herself on developing characters in depth, Tyler later criticized herself for the number of “shallow” characters in this and other earlier novels. Still the novel develops thoroughly “two splendid characters in Mrs. Emerson and Elizabeth Abbott.” Yardley also notes that The Clock Winder contains “page after page of utterly convincing dialogue, quiet humor and keen observation.” See also Clockwork universe theory References 1972 American novels Alfred A. Knopf books Novels by Anne Tyler Novels set in Baltimore English-language books