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The wedding weekend is not off to a good start for poor Gail, saddled with silly, affable Max and his old cat, unsure whether her daughter should even be getting married. The reader, too, might be feeling unsure at the end of the first of these three days in June. Do we really want these house guests Tyler is trying to put up in the chambers of our imagination for the duration of this novel?

Gail is snooty. She stays away from beauty parlours because they’re “real gabfests,� and can’t stand the groom’s sister because she has a “butter-wouldn’t-melt expression� and a “don’t-care outfit.� Max is a big-hearted oaf: the kind of man who thinks Kegels are called “geckos� and doesn’t check expiry dates, but who is great with animals and is an intuitive and attentive dad. Debbie, the bride, is beautiful (she looks “like a movie star,� and, later, like a “model on a magazine cover�), but grounded. Her fiancé, Kenneth, is a dud who might not be all bad.

These are familiar types, and they talk like regular people (when they aren’t talking like characters from a ’90s rom-com). That’s both a merit and a shortcoming. It’s a merit because it makes them more plausible and gives the novel such a smooth surface that the reader can scuttle along unimpeded. Tyler provides us with an affectionate rendering of the kind of speech that characterizes middle-class life, with its joys and sorrows. Like Tyler’s characters, most of us are left to navigate our woes with ten-cent words and homely clichés. And Tyler is good at showing how the words we’re stuck with can come to structure whole relationships. When Gail thinks back on what went wrong in her marriage, she concludes that Max once thought she “hung the moon,� then something changed, and he no longer did.

If Tyler’s reliance on cliché is a shortcoming, it’s because clichés are often inadequate to the novelist’s task of seeing further than the reader can. “Three Days in June� limits us to seeing what Gail sees, and Gail is not terribly perceptive about herself or those around her. She’s the kind of person who discovers tears on her face before she realizes she’s crying and comes up short when reaching for the words to explain the pain she’s feeling. Some readers will be touched, but others might long for characters with more self-knowledge and a greater capacity for expression.

Tyler nevertheless insists that Gail’s story is worth telling, and Tyler’s gift is to make that story remarkably compelling. Even readers who find her characters dull are likely to find the book hard to put down. By the time we’ve made it through the wedding and are recovering with Gail and Max at home the morning after, it’s become clear that Gail’s story is not so much about her daughter’s wedding as about her own marriage to Max.

Near the end of the novel, Gail and Max wind up somewhere called the Cultured Crab, where they experience a modest epiphany, having to do with how many tries it takes to get something right. Tyler knows something about this, having written 25 novels over the course of several decades. Forty years ago, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for “The Accidental Tourist,� then the Pulitzer Prize three years later for “Breathing Lessons.� Two decades later, “A Spool of Blue Thread� was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Another decade later, we have “Three Days in June.� This may not be the novel in which she finally gets everything right, but it’s rewarding (and instructive) to watch her keep trying.

Tyler’s novels have been dividing readers for decades. Her critics see them as banal and unimportant, while her defenders say she treats domestic life with the seriousness it deserves and has an uncanny ability to reproduce reality on the page. “Three Days in June� won’t settle that debate. It’s unlikely to satisfy readers who want to have to hammer and pry at a novel before it gives up its meat, but it’ll be gobbled up by plenty of others looking for something well-made and unfussy.