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You'll want to stop the car for this 'redhead by the side of the road'.

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Redhead by the Side of the Road

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Anne Tyler's latest novel is heartwarming balm for jangled nerves. Once again, she burrows so convincingly into the quotidian details of her main character's life, home, and head that you have to wonder if she's some sort of Alexa-gone-rogue.

Redhead by the Side of the Road has a lot going for it, beginning with its alluring title. But I'm not going to give away anything about that roadside presence except to say that the redhead is a lovely metaphor for the protagonist's inability to see clearly, which causes him to misread the relationships in his life.

The narrative's tone is warm and wry. Micah Mortimer is another likeable oddball in Tyler's pantheon. He's a hyper-disciplined, fastidiously well-organized, highly competent 43-year-old geek who lives rent-free in the basement apartment of a small Baltimore building in exchange for moonlighting as its super. He also runs a one-man on-call tech help service called Tech Hermit.

Whether she's writing about unfulfilled empty-nesters, lonely widowers or young control freaks, Tyler's novels demonstrate that it's never too late to change your life. But after several recent books about retirees — including Clock Dance, A Spool of Blue Thread, and Noah's Compass — Tyler returns with a story that shows it's never too early, either.

Unlike many of Tyler's novels, Redhead is not about her protagonist's discovery that he is living the wrong life. Micah has carefully structured his days to make sure he is living pretty much the life he wants. But it turns out his life isn't as perfect as he thought, and in fact, where relationships are concerned, perfection isn't a smart goal. We're close by his side as he starts to recognize this.

Author Interviews

A phone call changes everything in anne tyler's 'clock dance'.

Fizzy 'Vinegar Girl' Tames Shrewishness To Sparkle

"You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer," Tyler begins. "He lives alone; he keeps to himself; his routine is etched in stone." With obvious relish, she describes Micah's regimented, ordered days, from his daily run to his hot coffee, hot shower, and hot breakfast — all in turn followed by household chores on a strict rotation — beginning with mopping on Monday and ending with vacuuming on Friday. He has a longtime girlfriend, a fourth grade teacher named Cassia Slade, but they live apart.

By mid-morning, Micah heads out in his Kia to make house-calls to customers flummoxed by their glitchy computers and wi-fi networks. Many are older. Tyler gently mocks their all-too-common distress over lost passwords and moribund printers. "Old ladies had the easiest problems to fix but the greatest number of fractious questions," she writes. "They always want to know why. 'How come this happened?' they would ask." (I can relate. My time-pressed techie son has pointedly asked more than once when re-syncing my various electronic devices, "Mom, do you want me to fix the problem or explain it to you?")

Wondering about other people's seemingly ordinary lives is what drives Tyler's work . Inevitably, she also wonders what would happen if someone (we won't point fingers) were to mess with their routines. She shakes up Micah's orderly, comfortable existence by introducing not one but two upsets: His girlfriend is threatened with eviction from her sublet, and a coddled college freshman turns up, claiming that Micah is his real father.

The wry touches are plentiful and funny : Wearing a T-shirt that says "Grown-up," the teen tells Micah about a school paper on — irony of ironies — Emerson's "Self-Reliance." Even clueless Micah observes that this rich kid is "not the least bit equipped to make it on his own." When Cassia Slade's fourth graders at Linchpin Elementary School call for her, It sounds like "Mislaid! Mislaid!" to Micah's forlorn ears.

Micah is goofy. He talks to himself with a fake French accent when he cooks and imagines traffic gods applauding his excellent motor skills when he's driving. He isn't introspective, but he sure is sympathetic. Is he meant to be on the autism spectrum? Tyler doesn't say. What she cares about is her character's dawning realization that he's missing important social cues: "Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove."

Anne Tyler's novels are always worth scooping up — but especially this gently amusing soother, right now, when all of our cherished routines have been disrupted.

Redhead by the Side of the Road

178 pages, Hardcover

First published April 7, 2020

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The only place I went wrong, he writes, was expecting things to be perfect.

Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove.

“Sometimes,” she said musingly, “you can think back on your life and almost believe it was laid out for you in advance, like this plain clear path you were destined to take even if it looked like nothing but brambles and stobs at the time. You know?”

You would be the same way if you’d been reared in a household where the cat slept in the roasting pan.

Micah always thought that of course his sisters would choose to be waitresses. Restaurants had the same atmosphere of catastrophe that prevailed in their own homes, with pots clanking and glassware clashing and people shouting “Coming through!” and “Watch you head!” and “Help! I’m in the weeds!” A battlefield atmosphere, basically.

He hadn’t always thought marriage was messy. But each new girlfriend had been a kind of negative learning experience.

Sometimes I don’t manage to keep them endearing, and if that happens, I ditch them. It takes me two or three years to write a novel. I certainly don’t want to spend all that time living with someone unlikable.

In an interview in 1976, discussing Faulkner, Tyler said, “If it were possible to write like him I wouldn’t. I disagree with him. I want everyone to understand what I’m getting at.” As Katharine Whittemore wrote of Tyler in a superb essay in the Atlantic in 2001, “She never dazzles or blinds us with her prose. . . . Instead the quiet accretion of her insights hits one in the chest.”

“I’ve done everything wrong,” he tells her. “I was trying to make no mistakes at all and look at where it got me.”

“I don’t know how you can say that,” Suze told him. “If I weren’t on Facebook, I wouldn’t know what a single high-school friend of mine was up to.” “You care what your high-school friends are up to?” Micah asked.” I ask the same thing, buddy. I ask the same thing.

“The only place I went wrong, he writes, was expecting things to be perfect.”

“The point I’m trying to make,” Ada said, “is it’s not so much about whether a person is messy or neat. It’s whether they’re accepting or they’re not accepting of the way things happen to be. What we accepting ones know to say is, ‘It is what it is, in the end.’ ” “Well, I call that pretty discouraging,” Micah said. “What’s the point of living if you don’t try to do things better?”

“Like most families, the Mortimers believed that their family was more fascinating than anybody else’s. In a way, even Micah believed it, although he pretended not to.”

“You have to wonder what goes through the mind of such a man. Such a narrow and limited man; so closed off. He has nothing to look forward to, nothing to daydream about.”

“You had traits in common with Micah,” Roger repeated slowly. Micah stiffened. He was about to take serious offense. “With a man who earns his own living,” Roger said. “Who appears to be self-sufficient. Who works very hard, I assume, and expects no handouts.”

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REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

by Anne Tyler ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020

Suffused with feeling and very moving.

A man straitjacketed in routine blinks when his emotional blinders are removed in Tyler’s characteristically tender and rueful latest ( Clock Dance , 2018, etc.).

Micah’s existence is entirely organized to his liking. Each morning he goes for a run at 7:15; starts his work as a freelance tech consultant around 10; and in the afternoons deals with tasks in the apartment building where he is the live-in super. He’s the kind of person, brother-in-law Dave mockingly notes, who has an assigned chore for each day: “vacuuming day…dusting day….Your kitchen has a day all its own” (Thursday). Dave’s comments are uttered at a hilarious, chaotic family get-together that demonstrates the origins of Micah’s persnickety behavior and offers a welcome note of comedy in what is otherwise quite a sad tale. Micah thinks of himself as a good guy with a good life. It’s something of a shock when the son of his college girlfriend turns up wondering if Micah might be his father (not possible, it’s quickly established), and it’s really a shock when his casual agreement to let 18-year-old Brink crash in his apartment for a night leads Micah’s “woman friend,” Cass, to break up with him. “There I was, on the verge of losing my apartment,” she says. “What did you do? Quickly invite the nearest stranger into your spare room.” Indignant at first, Micah slowly begins to see the pattern that has kept him warily distant from other people, particularly the girlfriends who were only briefly good enough for him. (They were always the ones who left, once they figured it out.) The title flags a lovely metaphor for Micah’s lifelong ability to delude himself about the nature of his relationships. Once he realizes it, agonizing examples of the human connections he has unconsciously avoided are everywhere visible, his loneliness palpable. These chapters are painfully poignant—thank goodness Tyler is too warmhearted an artist not to give her sad-sack hero at least the possibility of a happy ending.

Pub Date: April 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-525-65841-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Anne Tyler

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

SEEN & HEARD

THE PERFECT COUPLE

by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 19, 2018

Sink into this book like a hot, scented bath...a delicious, relaxing pleasure. And a clever whodunit at the same time.

A wedding on Nantucket is canceled when the bride finds her maid of honor floating facedown in the Atlantic on the morning of the big day.

One of the supporting characters in Hilderbrand's ( Winter Solstice , 2017, etc.) 21st Nantucket novel is Greer Garrison, the mother of the groom and a well-known novelist. Unfortunately, in addition to all the other hell about to break loose in Greer's life, she's gone off her game. Early in the book, a disappointed reader wonders if "the esteemed mystery writer, who is always named in the same breath as Sue Grafton and Louise Penny, is coasting now, in her middle age." In fact, Greer's latest manuscript is about to be rejected and sent back for a complete rewrite, with a deadline of two weeks. But wanna know who's most definitely not coasting? Elin Hilderbrand. Readers can open her latest with complete confidence that it will deliver everything we expect: terrific clothes and food, smart humor, fun plot, Nantucket atmosphere, connections to the characters of preceding novels, and warmth in relationships evoked so beautifully it gets you right there. Example: a tiny moment between the chief of police and his wife. It's very late in the book, and he still hasn't figured out what the hell happened to poor Merritt Monaco, the Instagram influencer and publicist for the Wildlife Conservation Society. Even though it's dinner time, he has to leave the "cold blue cans of Cisco beer in his fridge” and get back to work. " ‘I hate murder investigations,’ [his wife] says, lifting her face for a kiss. ‘But I love you.’ " You will feel that just as powerfully as you believe that Celeste Otis, the bride-to-be, would rather be anywhere on Earth than on the beautiful isle of Nantucket, marrying the handsome, kind, and utterly smitten Benji Winbury. In fact, she had a fully packed bag with her at the crack of dawn when she found her best friend's body.

Pub Date: June 19, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-316-37526-9

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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‘Redhead by the Side of the Road,’ by Anne Tyler: An Excerpt

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You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer. He lives alone; he keeps to himself; his routine is etched in stone. At seven fifteen every morning you see him set out on his run. Along about ten or ten thirty he slaps the magnetic TECH HERMIT sign onto the roof of his Kia. The times he leaves on his calls will vary, but not a day seems to go by without several clients requiring his services. Afternoons he can be spotted working around the apartment building; he moonlights as the super. He’ll be sweeping the walk or shaking out the mat or conferring with a plumber. Monday nights, before trash day, he hauls the garbage bins to the alley; Wednesday nights, the recycling bins. At ten p.m. or so the three squinty windows behind the foundation plantings go dark. (His apartment is in the basement. It is probably not very cheery.)

He has a girlfriend, but they seem to lead fairly separate lives. You see her heading toward his back door now and then with a sack of takeout; you see them setting forth on a weekend morning in the Kia, minus the TECH HERMIT sign. He doesn’t appear to have male friends. He is cordial to the tenants but no more than that. They call out a greeting when they meet up with him and he nods amiably and raises a hand, often not troubling to speak. Nobody knows if he has family.

The apartment building’s in Govans—a small, three-story brick cube east of York Road in north Baltimore, with a lake-trout joint on the right and a used-clothing store on the left. Tiny parking lot out back. Tiny plot of grass in front. An incongruous front porch—just a concrete slab stoop, really—with a splintery wooden porch swing that nobody ever sits in, and a vertical row of doorbells next to the dingy white door.

[ Return to the review of “Redhead by the Side of the Road.” ]

Does he ever stop to consider his life? The meaning of it, the point? Does it trouble him to think that he will probably spend his next thirty or forty years this way? Nobody knows. And it’s almost certain nobody’s ever asked him.

On a Monday toward the end of October, he was still eating breakfast when his first call came in. Usually his morning went: a run, a shower, then breakfast, and then a little tidying up. He hated it when something interrupted the normal progression. He pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the screen: EMILY PRESCOTT. An old lady; he had dealt with her often enough that her name was in his directory. Old ladies had the easiest problems to fix but the greatest number of fractious questions. They always wanted to know why . “How come this happened?” they would ask. “Last night when I went to bed my computer was just fine and this morning it’s all kerblooey. But I didn’t do a thing to it! I was sound asleep!”

“Yeah, well, never mind, now I’ve got it fixed,” he would say.

“But why did it need fixing? What made it go wrong?” “That’s not the kind of question you want to ask about a

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Anne Tyler's Redhead by the Side of the Road Is a Wake-Up Call for Anyone Stuck In Old Ways

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author's latest is short and bittersweet

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As novelist Marilynne Robinson has observed, realism has been so predominant a literary style “that it is easy to forget it is a style.” One of its flawless practitioners is Anne Tyler, whose fiction maps the sea changes of her characters in carefully calibrated, deceptively understated prose.

Redhead by the Side of the Road: A novel

Her entrancing 23rd novel, Redhead by the Side of the Road , features an everyman protagonist, 43-year-old Micah Mortimer, a never-married computer consultant and building super in Baltimore whose future should have added up to more. Micah paces through his daily regime efficiently, content to stay year after year in his sparsely furnished basement apartment, interrupted periodically by phone calls from his Tech Hermit clients or to share takeout with his “woman friend,” Cass. But his routine ruptures when Cass is evicted from her sublet and Brink, a young college student he’s never met, shows up on his doorstep, claiming to be his son.

In all her work, Tyler places protagonists in situations that force them out of their well-worn comfort zones. So too with Micah, who’s survived up to now by not examining his life too closely. Tyler is a keen-eyed but tenderhearted social observer whose heroes and heroines are frequently allergic to change, even when it’s for the best. With his love life on the skids, Micah realizes his self-sufficiency has come at a cost: He’s actually lonely. Few writers flesh out the malaise of middle age with such delicate, assured strokes. Tyler is an American Vermeer whose canvases keep opening whole worlds within compact frames.

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A former book editor and the author of a memoir, This Boy's Faith, Hamilton Cain is Contributing Books Editor at Oprah Daily. As a freelance journalist, he has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Health, The Good Men Project, and The List (Edinburgh, U.K.) and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle and lives with his family in Brooklyn.  

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Theresa Smith Writes

Delighting in all things bookish, book review: redhead by the side of the road by anne tyler, redhead by the side of the road…, about the book:.

From the bestselling author of A Spool of Blue Thread: an offbeat love story about mis-steps, second chances and the elusive art of human connection.

Micah Mortimer isn’t the most polished person you’ll ever meet. His numerous sisters and in-laws regard him oddly but very fondly, but he has his ways and means of navigating the world. He measures out his days running errands for work – his TECH HERMIT sign cheerily displayed on the roof of his car – maintaining an impeccable cleaning regime and going for runs (7:15, every morning). He is content with the steady balance of his life.

But then the order of things starts to tilt. His woman friend Cassia (he refuses to call anyone in her late thirties a ‘girlfriend’) tells him she’s facing eviction because of a cat. And when a teenager shows up at Micah’s door claiming to be his son, Micah is confronted with another surprise he seems poorly equipped to handle.

Redhead by the Side of the Road is an intimate look into the heart and mind of a man who sometimes finds those around him just out of reach – and a love story about the differences that make us all unique.

My Thoughts:

I adored this novel. The hours I spent reading it were a pure bliss of escape from the lounge room I have been in for what now seems like forever. And you really do escape: it’s as though Anne Tyler picks you up and pulls you into the story, casting you into an observational role, her writing is just that immersive. Micah has quite a large family and there was a section where he goes to lunch at his sister’s, the whole extended family is there, probably upward of twenty people if you consider the children. There are several conversations going on and so many sisters and husbands and nieces and nephews with children of their own, and yet, I didn’t once experience even a flicker of confusion as to what was going on and who was doing the talking at any given time. I love fiction that can pull you in like that, create a sense of rowdiness that appears chaotic yet is tightly controlled by the skill of the author. Anne Tyler is a master at this.

Now, Micah was such an endearing character. Driven so much by routine, even his spontaneity was somewhat planned. I will confess, just quietly, that I do share Micah’s views on housekeeping:

‘It was Micah’s personal theory that if you actually noticed the difference you made when you cleaned – the coffee table suddenly shiny, the rug suddenly lint-free – it meant you had waited too long to do it.’

I drive myself spare sometimes on account of this but it’s somewhat ingrained within me and difficult to fight. This whole novel is just brimming with witty and honest observations, this is the sort of humour that I can’t get enough of. It’s also the type of humour that is difficult for an author to nail without appearing as though they’re trying too hard, but not so for Anne Tyler. She hits the right note each and every time. Micah was a considerate and caring man, as demonstrated with his neighbours and family, but he sometimes missed the beat with his more personal relationships, much to his own ire. I loved the way he interacted with his sisters, all older than him. They mothered him but were also very grounding. The entire family dynamics within this story were fantastic, actually.

The cover for this novel (the one pictured here) puts me in mind of the early readers we used to get in primary school and even the title gave me a feeling of nostalgia for the same reason. The title itself is quite interesting and it was amusing to discover ‘who’ the redhead by the side of the road was. It’s not a big secret, so I don’t feel like I’m spoiling that for you by exploring it here. Micah runs each day but he does so without wearing his glasses, which are for distance. So things coming up ahead as he’s running are often blurry. Hence, each and every day, he mistakes a faded red fire hydrant for a redhead by the side of the road. The symbolism of this exists not within the fire hydrant itself, but within the way Micah consistently mistakes it for a redhead by the side of the road every single day.

‘He momentarily mistook the hydrant for a redhead and gave his usual shake of the shoulders at how repetitious this thought was, how repetitious all his thoughts were, how they ran in a deep rut and how his entire life ran in a rut, really.’

And herein lies the beauty of this novel, the depth of meaning that runs below the surface of what might appear initially as a very simple and somewhat funny story. It’s so much more than that. It’s a story about human interaction, about acceptance and adjustment, about self-realisation in the face of not necessarily losing everything, but rather, in gaining nothing by maintaining your current routines and outlook. I have to say, this little novel is a slice of literary perfection.

‘I’m a roomful of broken hearts.’

About the Author:

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grownups, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Thread, Vinegar Girl and Clock Dance. In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as ‘the greatest novelist writing in English’; in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence; and in 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize.

Redhead by the Side of the Road Published by Penguin Random House UK – Chatto & Windus Released 9th April 2020

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26 thoughts on “ book review: redhead by the side of the road by anne tyler ”.

This sounds good…I haven’t read anything of hers since The Accidental Tourist!

Like Liked by 1 person

This is only 170 pages too, so it was a nice quick read.

Sometimes that is just what you want 🙂

Oh dear … a quick read that took me two weeks! I’ve been so tired that all I managed was about 10 pages a night and night was the only time I got to read. But, like you, I so enjoyed this book, as I’ve enjoyed all the Tylers I’ve read. She just nails these slightly off-centre characters that you like despite their foibles and their sometimes infuriating blindnesses. She comes up with such interesting and yet believable situations. And, like you, I like her humour. (I’ve just read the review by Jeanne, Necromancy Never Pays. She found it really depressing. I think it was due to how she was feeling re COVID at the time – which was a couple of weeks before you wrote your review.)

BTW I’m afraid I’m the opposite of you and Micah. I like to see some result when I clean – I like to see the floor or the bench come up sparkling again. What’s the point of cleaning something that looks clean!!

A question I have failed to come up with a suitable answer for! I am getting better with the floors and less particular as time goes on which for me, given my tendencies, is only a good thing. Necromancy Never Pays…the titles she comes up with! No comparison Sue, time wise re reading this one. These are extenuating circumstances for you. As long as you enjoyed those 10 pages a night! Weren’t Micah’s sisters just wonderful? I love those interactions.

Thanks Theresa. Yes, I loved that big family scene in particular. I don’t have a big family like that, but still it rang so true. And I loved the Tech Hermit interactions. They were so true too. How she did it all in under 180 pages is a wonder.

I know. So tightly woven! She is a master.

I love Anne Tyler’s books – so looking forward to reading this one. Sounds like she’s on top form here. Thanks for the review

You should enjoy it then!

I have never read Anne Tyler…..she’s one of those authors that I keep MEANING to and then…..just do not get around to it. Terrible really!

This was my first and I have since bought five of her other titles on ebook. I can’t believe it took me so long!!

Wow, okay you must’ve REALLY loved this one then! I love when that happens, you find an author that makes you so excited and wonderfully, they already have an extensive backlist so you can just indulge. Which other titles did you grab?

Breathing Lessons The Clock Winder Clock Dance (I remember requesting this one for review but not receiving it) Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (on my to buy list ever since seeing it reviewed on the ABC First Tuesday Bookclub that used to be on) A Spool of Blue Thread I just ADORE the covers!

I’ve loved her since reading The accidental tourist in the mid 80s. Since then I’ve read four or five more, but until this one, none in the last ten years though I’ve wanted to and had given a couple during that time to my Mum. She is a wonderfully accessible yet interesting writer.

This has reminded me that I haven’t yet read any of these new ones I bought.

So hard to find time for all the books, isn’t it.

I don’t make it any easier on myself by wanting to read so many!

I really love Anne Tyler. She is very widely read back home but I don’t find Australians as up on her work. I hope you enjoy the other books you bought!

Thanks! I remember the discussion about her work on the ABC First Tuesday Book Club and it stuck with me as an author to read. Glad I finally have!

I loved this book to pieces too Theresa, but after writing my first paragraph about the significance of the title and the fire hydrant, I stalled. I’m back at work again & struggling to find the time again – for anything! But you’ve put on a smile on face remembering this wonderful story. PS I also loved, loved Homesick Restaurant. It’s very intense!

I’m a bit like that at present, if I don’t get in and write up something straight away, it really falls by the wayside. I remember Marieke Hardy raving about Homesick Restaurant! Did you read anything else into the fire hydrant?

I did. I was trying to work out how to word it – something about perception, ways of seeing etc. once I get it, the rest of the post will run 😊

This sounds great, great review, another one to add to the list of hopefuls.

At least this one is short! 😄

I’ve never read Anne Tyler, but this review has inspired me to pick up one of her books – I’ll be adding this to my GoodReads:)

Oh I’m so glad my review has done this for you! I hope you enjoy whichever one of hers you pick up first.

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Book review: Anne Tyler’s ‘Redhead by the Side of the Road’ is light on drama, not that we could handle more drama now anyway

Anne Tyler’s new novel, “Redhead by the Side of the Road,” is either wholly irrelevant or just what we need – or possibly both. Slight and slightly charming, it’s like the cherry Jell-O that Mom serves when you’re feeling under the weather. Not much of a meal, perhaps, but who could handle more now?

The milquetoast protagonist is Micah Mortimer, “a tall, bony man in his early forties with not-so-good posture.” He lives in a basement apartment in Baltimore, which over the course of more than 20 novels has become Tyler’s Yoknapatawpha. Gilded with a patina of quirkiness, Micah is a self-employed computer fix-it guy. Tellingly, he calls himself the Tech Hermit. He repairs elderly folks’ PCs, sometimes by turning them off and turning them back on.

At the opening, Tyler says, “You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer,” but she doesn’t wonder very hard. “He keeps to himself,” she says. “His routine is etched in stone.” He rises, runs, eats breakfast and answers a few calls. Monday is trash night. “Micah prided himself on his housekeeping.”

He might not have a pulse, but he does have a girlfriend. “She was matronly,” Tyler writes, “which Micah found kind of a turn-on.” That marks the erotic peak of this novel. “He and Cass had been together for three years or so, and they had reached the stage where things had more or less solidified: compromises arrived at, incompatibilities adjusted to, minor quirks overlooked. They had it down to a system.”

Or so Micah assumes. In the first chapter, Cass fears she’s about to be evicted from her apartment. When Micah reacts with insufficient sympathy, she breaks up with him. I have switched dry cleaners with more drama.

Of course, there’s also a sweet and somewhat amusing family in this novel, and, of course, they have sweet and somewhat amusing rituals involving food. “The table itself was bare,” Tyler writes, “except for a portable Ping Pong net that had been stretched across the center.” If you’ve read and adored as many of Tyler’s novels as I have, such idiosyncrasies convey all the reassuring warmth of an old hymn.

Micah’s four sisters – all lifelong waitresses – pester him to get Cass back, lest he “end up a crusty old bachelor,” but he resists their efforts. Still, the minor disruptions to Micah’s orderly life are just beginning. A preppy young man named Brink shows up at the door. He’s run away from college and his parents.

“I don’t belong in that family,” Brink tells Micah. “I’m a, like, misfit. They’re all so … I’m more like you.” Having found old photos from his mother’s college years, Brink is convinced that Micah must be his real father. Alas, the calendar won’t support that conclusion and neither, I bet, would Micah’s testosterone levels.

From these small complications, Tyler spins a small story about a man perplexed by the tepid state of his life. “He had no one,” he realizes. “His entire life ran in a rut.” But maybe, he thinks, he just doesn’t want all the “fuss and bother” of being close to someone.

There is nothing necessarily objectionable about a novel focused on “such a narrow and limited man,” as Tyler calls Micah. Writers as diverse as Sinclair Lewis and Anita Brookner have found profound comedy and pathos in the lives of apparently dull people. But in this case, the mold growing on Micah’s airless character seems to have spread to the narration itself.

These characters are a series of moderately eccentric poses presented without much wit or psychological insight. (It doesn’t help that Micah sometimes inexplicably affects the manner of a 1950s TV actress: “Lord forbid,” he says at one point. “That must have been a passing fancy.”)

Although the real world exists in this novel, it’s safely off to the side. Here, sadness is possible, even loneliness, but the bumper guards are up: No one risks slipping into despair or, for that matter, tasting anything like elation. The movie adaptation should be filmed entirely in shades of beige.

Tyler’s best novels are so wonderful that they’ve tended to eclipse her short stories, but that would have been a more effective form for “Redhead by the Side of the Road.” Tightly compressed, Micah’s gentle quest for a better life would feel more buoyant – and this novel’s lovely final page wouldn’t feel so needlessly delayed.

With climate change, is hydropower still a renewable energy resource?

Recently, US News & World Report listed the states with the best energy infrastructure.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, redhead by the side of the road.

A new Anne Tyler novel is always a welcome event, but if there was ever a time when we needed the life-affirming qualities of her work, it’s in the midst of a life-threatening global pandemic. In REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, a gentle story of missed connections and second chances, Tyler delivers a soothing dose of the antidote for some of our anxiety and enforced isolation.

Not surprisingly, the book is set in familiar Tyler territory: her hometown of Baltimore. Its unassuming protagonist, 43-year-old Micah Mortimer, lives in a nondescript neighborhood, in the basement of a small apartment building where he moonlights as the superintendent. Micah runs a technology repair business --- Tech Hermit --- making house calls for everything from a balky printer to a lost password, and he’s written a manual for novice computer users, modestly titled First, Plug It In .

"In REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, a gentle story of missed connections and second chances, Tyler delivers a soothing dose of the antidote for some of our anxiety and enforced isolation."

Above all, Micah prizes order and predictability, his routine “etched in stone.” Every day of the week has its assigned domestic tasks, and when he’s driving, he imagines he’s being watched by a surveillance system he calls “Traffic God,” which is “operated by a fleet of men in shirtsleeves and green visors who frequently commented to one another on the perfection of Micah’s driving.” Micah’s woman friend, Cass Slade (he rejects the term “girl” for a female in her 30s), is a fourth-grade teacher. It appears that shared meals predominate over romance in their relationship. Micah admits he hasn’t had a “very good history with women. It just seemed they kept losing interest in him; he couldn’t exactly say why.” In the end, he concludes, “living with someone full-time was just too messy” for this fastidious man.

On the surface, it seems that Micah has struck a reasonable bargain with life, eschewing excitement and variety for order and predictability. “Really, his life was good,” Micah thinks, as he completes another flawless drive. “He had no reason to feel unhappy.” But with Micah, we realize “how repetitious all his thoughts were, how they ran in a deep rut and how his entire life ran in a rut, really.”

That settled existence is upended when 18-year-old Brink Bartell Adams appears at his apartment one morning. Brink, the son of Micah’s college girlfriend, Lorna Bartell --- the woman he’s thought of for more than 20 years as his “first great romance” --- has left college and is hiding out from his parents, both lawyers in Washington, DC. He’s dropped in on Micah, someone he thinks of as an “odd-jobs guy,” more his type of person than his overachieving parents, sparking a moment of regret for Micah that he’s become a “poster boy for layabouts.”

In the process of thoughtfully engineering a reunion between Brink and Lorna, Micah “was visited by a kind of translucent scarf of a memory floating down upon him,” in Tyler’s casually beautiful image, and he comes to understand the truth about his relationship with Lorna and the reason it ended. Though the stakes of the novel aren’t especially high, from the beginning, Micah, who thinks of himself as a “roomful of broken hearts,” is such a pleasantly engaging character that it’s impossible not to root for him to find true happiness --- and especially the love of a caring woman --- even as one realizes that in his carefully constructed life, he simply may have forgotten how to look for it.

Tyler doesn’t clutter her story with subplots, and what complications there are are modest, so it’s possible to slip quickly through this slim novel in a couple of hours. But in that brief interval, with her customary grace and humanity, she helps us escape effortlessly from life’s real troubles to fiction’s invented ones. That’s the gift that makes it impossible to leave Micah Mortimer without a wistful feeling and the hope that things turn out well for him, and for us, in the end.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg on April 17, 2020

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

• Publication Date: March 30, 2021
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Vintage
• ISBN-10: 0593080947
• ISBN-13: 9780593080948

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler, review: the most influential novelist of her era?

Anne Tyler may, in the end, prove to be one of the most influential novelists of her generation. While critics were busy lauding authors with much more obviously weighty and portentous topics, Tyler’s technically flawless novels of domestic relationships, mostly in Baltimore, were drawing the attention of writers. 

The best American writers now, from Elizabeth Strout to Michael Cunningham, give the impression of having learnt much more from Anne Tyler than from John Updike. The old accusation of suburban cosiness, of what used to be called a middlebrow quality, no longer convinces, now that many of her books have demonstrated real, lasting worth.

They are optimistic books, and are evidently the work of someone who genuinely likes and is interested in human beings. But they don’t minimise suffering, or automatically reward likeability. They know all about the cost of maintaining likeability, and some of her most memorable inventions, like Rebecca in Back When We Were Grownups, are studies in keeping the show on the road. 

There is real horror present. The Accidental Tourist takes place in the wake of the senseless murder of a child, and the dog the child left behind has teeth that draw blood. Saint Maybe, perhaps the most moving of all her books, is about a lifelong act of atonement for a single sentence that, once spoken, kills two people and leaves three small children abandoned – the plot has some of the gravity of Conrad’s Lord Jim.

Many of her favourite subjects are, quite frankly, difficult people. Pearl, the matriarch in her first great book, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, is abandoned by her husband, and Tyler doesn’t hesitate; there is a lot about Pearl that no one could stick. Quite a lot of her novels take place over a very long timespan, and we often watch these characters grow up, or grow old; we get used to them; we start to see them understand what they’ve done; we are on their side. I thought I would never get behind the family in Digging to America that tries to recreate Korean culture in Baltimore for the benefit of their adoptive baby; Tyler’s patient exploration turned what starts with the whiff of satire into warm, humane life.

Her books are so irresistibly readable that it’s startling to realise what technical marvels they often are. The first chapter of A Patchwork Planet is extraordinarily compelling; but all that happens is that one stranger asks another to carry out a very minor task. The task is done without any effort. Nothing goes wrong. The virtuosity is in portraying it through the eyes of a man in whose hands it certainly would have gone wrong. Our interest, and our sympathy, is all with the observer. 

Probably her most showy technical feat is also her most enchantingly relaxed performance; Breathing Lessons, which takes place on a single day, as a long-married pair go to a funeral, visit an estranged daughter-in-law, bicker and make up. Nothing much is altered by anything that happens in the story; after a few pages, almost nothing would stop you reading.

Redhead by the Side of the Road is Tyler’s 23rd novel, and unmistakably a “late work”. It shows some signs of paring down that reminded me of the last couple of novels of Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont and Blaming. Like Taylor, Tyler has often been a novelist who loves a book crowded with characters – it takes some time to sort out the family in the tumultuous Back When We Were Grownups. Here, the structure is much simpler, and really depends only on four characters.

Micah Mortimer is one of Tyler’s unambitious but indispensable cogs in society; he has a business servicing the computers of the neighbourhood. He knows most people think his passion for order is excessive (“Some might leave [the dishes] to air-dry, but Micah hated the cluttered appearance of dishes sitting out in a draining rack.”) He may not pick up social clues very reliably. (“Am I the very dumbest old biddy among all your clients?” Mrs Prescott asked him. “No, not at all,” he told her truthfully. “You’re not even in the top 10.”) 

When his woman friend (“he refused to call anyone in her late 30s ‘a girlfriend’ ”) appears to be on the verge of eviction from her flat, he listens carefully, and offers rational advice. “You’ll find another place, trust me.” The relationship is over, to Micah’s surprise.

Micah’s orderly life gets another push when an unknown teenage boy turns up, the son of a woman Micah had dated years ago; what the boy Brink has come to think about Micah shapes the story, and when his mother turns up, gives us a glimpse of the unspoken and strangely comfortable tensions within family relationships. Brink’s travails are comic; he is in trouble at university for plagiarising an essay. (“’What was the topic?’’ “Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance.’”) Micah’s clients form a charming chorus; his huge family provide a chapter to be cherished, as sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews all pile in. But it’s a concise and trimmed-down novel at the root.

I think I like Tyler best when she is more crowded and garrulous. One might gently suggest, from an observer normally so acute and precise, that Micah seems much more like an old man, with his pottering and his eyesight problems, than a man in his early 40s. But the novel still has her vividly evocative way with language, rooted in ordinary speech. Micah wears “scuffed brown round-toed shoes that seem humble, like a schoolboy’s shoes”. 

There is, too, the distinctive Tyler approach to ethics; she has thought deeply about the right way to live, and after a novel like A Spool of Blue Thread, we find ourselves thinking seriously, too. But the debate is lightly worn, and always limited by what human beings can bear. What is so moving about Tyler’s work is that, always, we have the illusion that we’re hearing what her people feel like saying, and no more than that. 

“‘Well, I call that pretty discouraging,’ Micah said. ‘What’s the point of living if you don’t try to do things better?’ Ada shrugged and handed a child a plate of dessert. ‘You got me there,’ she said.”

Redhead by the Side of the Road is published by Chatto & Windus on April 9 at £14.99. To order the e-book for £9.99, visit the Telegraph Bookshop

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