Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler review – skilled but pointless Shakespeare retread

This update of The Taming of the Shrew is enjoyable but never manages to convince that it’s more than a mere marketing exercise

Poor Anne Tyler had an uphill job getting this reader on board here. I love Tyler’s work and am predisposed to admire anything she writes. (Favourite: The Amateur Marriage.) But I remain slightly uneasy about this new publishing trend for retreads of famous authors. And Vinegar Girl is a rewrite of The Taming of the Shrew as part of Vintage’s “Hogarth Shakespeare”, marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death: “The world’s favourite playwright. Today’s best-loved novelists. Timeless stories retold.” Is it me or is there something chilling about that fusion?

Vinegar Girl is the third in the series after Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time (The Winter’s Tale) and Howard Jacobson’s Shylock Is My Name (The Merchant of Venice). Tracy Chevalier’s Othello, Gillian Flynn’s Hamlet, Jo Nesbø’s Macbeth and Edward St Aubyn’s King Lear are yet to come. (See what I mean?) This follows Penguin’s the Austen Project – “retellings” of Emma by Alexander McCall Smith, Pride and Prejudice by Curtis Sittenfeld, and so on. I’m looking forward to the Proust one. Will Self at the ready?

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