'Redhead by the Side of the Road,' by Anne Tyler / Review by Laurie Hertzel

By Laurie


Review:
'Redhead
by the Side
of the Road,'
by Anne Tyler




Star Tribune

Review: 

'Redhead 

by the Side 

of the Road,' 

by Anne Tyler

By Laurie Hertzel

Star Tribune

April 5, 2020

Book by book, over her 55-year career, novelist Anne Tyler has built a literary portrait of Baltimore and populated it with quirky, warmly human characters.

Tyler's women are mostly vivacious and chatty, with flyaway hair and a zest for life. Her men are mostly oddball misfits, a little out of step with the world. "Gentle, bumbling men," a critic for Kirkus Reviews once called them. Men such as Macon Leary, the Accidental Tourist who hated leaving home; or slow-moving, deliberate Ezra Tull, who ran the Homesick Restaurant and dreamed of giving everyone a home-cooked meal.

Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler Could Make Even Quarantined Lives Feel Expansive and Lovely

The author’s 23rd novel Redhead By the Side of a Road follows a small life and makes it meaningful—who can’t relate these days?

Bobby Finger
April 1, 2020


The latest novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Tyler, ends just as all her others have, which is to say it delivers upon its protagonist a moment of profound, much-deserved hope. In this case, the recipient is Michah Mortimer, a “tall, bony man in his early forties” who owns a one-man tech support business. This is by no means a spoiler. That her endings have a consistency of tone is a hallmark of Tyler’s writing, and the reason Redhead By the Side of the Road–out April 7–is so well-timed.

I fell for Tyler and her soothing bibliography only recently, after she was recommended to me by a friend who happens to be this publication’s Chief Critic. (A reliable source.) “I think you’ll like her,” he told me late last summer. Today, less than a year later, I’ve read all 22 of her novels, and felt the same peace each time I arrive at another ending. Redhead is no exception, despite its modest size and scope.

Tyler tends to focus on the dynamics of large, middle-class American families– the relationships between parents and their children, the grudges between those children and their siblings, and the reverberations of generations past, despite a person’s best efforts to escape them. She thrives in big, creaky old houses bursting at the seams with people (even if only on special occasions) and provides detailed histories for her characters in lengthy, chapter-length flashbacks. But Redhead, in its 192 pages, keeps Michah’s jogging feet firmly in the present. His quirky family takes center stage only briefly, which allows Michah to spend a great deal of this novel talking to himself in his spartan North Baltimore apartment (where he also works as its super) or chatting with just one other person. Among his occasional run-ins are his girlfriend Cass, a schoolteacher on the verge of homelessness after violating the terms of her lease by adopting a cat; Yolanda, a neighbor whose maintenance troubles are no match for her romantic ones; Brink, a college freshman who shows up on his doorstep claiming to be his son; and Lorna, the boy’s mother, with whom Michah had a relationship decades earlier.

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

1

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.)

Anne Tyler Is Back, Scrutinizing an Inscrutable Man in Chaos

Amy Bloom
April 7, 2020

Anne Tyler knows what she’s doing. She knows noisy, complaining, blaming and manipulative siblings inside and out (and their offspring and all those other people who get dragged in: babysitters, neighbors, step-aunts), the chaotic reunions and holidays, marked by hilarious and painful awkwardness, dotted with moments of grace, often offered by a particularly graceless person.

Even Anne Tyler can’t make a solitary Baltimore janitor sound interesting

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler reviewed

Redhead by the Side of the RoadAnne Tyler

Knopf, pp.192, $26.95

Alex Clark
April 2, 2020

Micah Mortimer, the strikingly unproactive protagonist of Anne Tyler’s 23rd novel, is a man of such unswerving routine that his rare moments of whimsy — slipping into a foreign accent on Mondays when the week turns to floor-cleaning and ‘zee dreaded moppink’ — come to seem like unfathomable caprice. Indulging a sudden hankering for a takeaway barbecue is as wild to him as one of Hunter S. Thompson’s most lurid binges. The reasons for his cautious mundanity are unclear: he emerged from a chaotic family, but so did his convivial, cheerful sisters; he’s no stranger to romantic disappointment, but then who is?

Anne Tyler talks Baltimore, her new book and social distance

Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler talks Baltimore, 

her new book and 

social distance

Anne Tyler habla de nuevo libro y distanciamiento social

By HILLEL ITALIE
April 6, 2020

NEW YORK (AP) — After more than 20 books, 
Anne Tyler still finds ways to challenge herself.

Her new novel, “Redhead By the Side of the Road,” is, of course, set in her longtime home of Baltimore and features the family and romantic entanglements and other narrative touches Tyler fans know well. But the story’s main character, a self-employed tech consultant/repairman confronting the fallout of decisions made years before, pretty much came out of nowhere.

“This is the first book I’ve written where I began with no idea,” Tyler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist known for “The Accidental Tourist,” “Morgan’s Passing” and “Breathing Lessons,” told The Associated Press in a recent email. “I was wracking my brains for something to write about, and a single sentence popped into my head: ‘You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like ____ ____.’ (I didn’t have a name for him yet.) I was baffled. Why should I have to wonder? I thought, and then up popped the next sentence: ’He lives alone; he keeps to himself . . . ’”

“The rest of the book was up to me, but at least I was on my way.”

Anne Tyler

The computer man’s name is Micah Mortimer. He lives alone and wonders if he’s meant to be that way as he alienates his current girlfriend and unexpectedly reconnects with the woman he loved — and drove away — back in college. Tyler tries to minimize politics and topical references in her books, but is quite specific about locations, placing Micah in north Baltimore, in a three-story home near York Road, with an “incongruous front porch” and a “splintery front porch swing that nobody ever sits in.”

During her recent AP interview, the 78-year-old Tyler discussed the mind of Micah, the book’s tricky title, Baltimore and her life during the coronavirus outbreak.

___

On Micah, whom she describes in one passage as “narrow and limited” but still aware of the world’s horrors, whether the 2018 at a Pittsburgh synagogue or the tragedies along the U.S.-Mexican border:

“I found it easy to ‘be’ Micah, so to speak, throughout the book, but especially in that passage. We all have lonesome moments, after all; it’s no stretch to imagine those. But also the events that he’s reflecting upon here — the synagogue shooting, the plight of immigrant children — weigh so heavily on my mind these days, as I imagine they do on everyone’s, that I felt even Micah would have to be affected by them.”

___

On the book’s title, based on a recurring hallucination of Micah’s:

“Several times I mistook the same object for another on my morning walk, although you’d think I would have learned after the first time. The experience started me thinking: How many other mistakes, more serious mistakes, do we repeat in the course of our lives? How often do we fail to realize that they were mistakes, even? I thought it would be fun to explore the issue.”

___

On life in Baltimore:

“I guess it’s no secret that Baltimore is going through a hard spell. And yet it’s such a kindhearted city, paradoxical though that sounds. Just about everyone here, across all classes and cultures, behaves with grace and patience. Watch some trying episode in, say, a supermarket checkout line — a customer taking too long counting coins or a cashier who doesn’t know his produce codes. Baltimoreans stand by quietly, or they try to help out if they can. Not even an eye-roll! I think this has an influence on my writing. In such surroundings, how could I possibly invent a mean-spirited character?

___

On how Micah would handle social distancing?

“I think he would have handled it the way I have. First I thought, `Oh, well, never mind; I basically shelter in place anyhow, and I already know about working from home — how you have to be sure and change out of your pajamas.′ But then after a few days I thought, `Oh. Wait a minute. I’m surprised at how often now I feel the need to step out on my front stoop and start a conversation with a passing neighbor.′

___

On how the book, completed well before the pandemic, might read now:

“I haven’t read the book since the virus began. A friend asked recently, though, how I’d known to write pages 94-95, so I checked to see what she meant. Lo and behold, there was Micah on his early-morning run fantasizing, briefly, that the empty streets were due to some global disaster and he was the last person left alive. Then he comes upon two women talking up a storm together, and he’s extremely pleased to see them. I relate to that scene now much more than when I wrote it.”

___

On writing while sheltering in place:

“For the first few days, I seemed to keep writing the same three pages over and over again. I just had a general feeling of distractedness. Eventually, though, I did sink back into my work. I happened to be writing about an Easter dinner with a lot of people attending, some of them behaving a bit snarkily with each other. I thought, Oh, now I remember why I write. I write because it makes me happy.”

``As for whether the virus will turn up in my next book: Well, generally I don’t think current events make for very good literature. They have to mellow for a while. We need a little distance to see them for what they are.”

AP NEWS

Redhead By the Side of the Road review / Another gem from Anne Tyler

BOOK OF THE DAY

Redhead By the Side of the Road review – another gem from Anne Tyler

A mundane life is once again thrown into turmoil in the US writer’s best novel in some time

The 100 best novels / No 96 / Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1988)

Julie Myerson
Monday 30 March 2020

A

nne Tyler has won so many plaudits over the past 50 odd years that it’s hard to think of new superlatives to add. But reading this enjoyable novel – her 23rd – it struck me that there can’t be a writer, of either gender, who creates more engaging or multi-dimensional men. Aren’t some of her most memorable and satisfying novels those where she plumbs the male human heart and psyche with all of her customary tenderness and honesty? Who can forget Saint Maybe’s self-lacerating Ian Bedloe, or the poles-apart brothers from Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant? Or – probably my favourite – the heart-wrenched Macon Leary in The Accidental Tourist?

And now – chiming eerily at least in name with Macon – here’s fortysomething Micah, blue-eyed, with “not-so-good posture”, clad in jeans and a “partially erased looking” brown leather jacket. After he walked away from an IT startup, Micah now runs Tech Hermit and runs around the neighbourhood fixing computer problems for old ladies who – and you’d be right to bet Tyler mines this for full comic potential – don’t know what a modem is or does.

Micah knows that his modestly selling manual, the delectably titled “First, Plug It In”, is unlikely to make him rich. So his second day-job is as apartment caretaker and general odd-job man. He lives rent-free, alone, keeps to himself and sticks to a routine “etched in stone”: Friday is vacuuming day, Monday floor-mopping, and so on. Even his relationship with his “restful to look at” teacher girlfriend has, by his own admission, “solidified”. Nevertheless, as he regularly reassures himself, he has “no reason to feel unhappy”.

No long-term reader of Tyler will be surprised to hear that all of this careful, oddball living, this unswerving rigidity, is about to be thrown furiously and entertainingly off balance. For it is after all a perennial Tyler theme: the decent, mundane, settling-for-less kind of life whose uneasy decorum is suddenly exploded by the random, the uncontrolled, the latent sense of what might have been. Still, it’s hard to remember when she last exploded it to such satisfying and disarming effect.

Two things happen. First the disaffected, fatherless teenage son of Micah’s high-school sweetheart turns up on his doorstep. Having managed to convince himself that Micah might actually be his real father, he has – to the latter’s consternation – soon inveigled himself into the spare room. At the same time, Micah’s girlfriend, suddenly threatened with eviction from her own apartment, is clearly waiting to be asked to move in. Wholly unrealising – “he hated it when women expected you to read their minds” – Micah jokes that she could always sleep in her car. Unsurprisingly, she declares the relationship over.

 

Tyler’s ability to make you care about her characters is amazing, and never more so than here

Meanwhile, managing to misread his teenage guest with equal aplomb – “he had handled this all wrong, he realised. But even given a second chance, he wasn’t sure what he’d do differently” – Micah sends him packing. Alone again – and uneasily aware of the “nagging ache in the hollow of his chest” – he wonders why his rigid routines suddenly don’t feel quite so comforting. He tries skipping his customary shower and shave, but – and here’s how to nail the essence of a character in one deft stroke – can’t seem to come up with “any further ways to indulge himself”.

Tyler rarely disappoints, but this is her best novel in some time – slender, unassuming, almost cautious in places, yet so very finely and energetically tuned, so apparently relaxed, almost flippantly so, but actually supremely sophisticated. Slippery, too. It appears at first sight to be a novel about a good and well-meaning man – a man who, as Micah brokenly tells his girlfriend, set out to “make no mistakes at all”. But in fact it’s a tale of someone who has opted out, who has doggedly failed to engage, who’s made a habit of walking away from almost everything.

But Tyler’s ability to make you care about her characters is amazing, and never more so than here. Certainly, in Micah, she’s created a man to puzzle and worry about, to ache and to root for. Even his ongoing interior monologue – evoked in the kind of mild, deadpan, indirect speech she’s always done so well – creates a brand of domestic suspense that manages to be both hilarious and painful at the same time.

Finally, in a stroke that is pure Tyler, that “redhead” of the title isn’t at all what you think. What seems at first to be no more than an incidental detail blooms and morphs and takes root in your imagination until at last, closing the book, you realise that actually none of her novels has been better named.

THE GUARDIAN

Anne Tyler / Grieving Lessons

Anne TylerCredit...Illustration by Tina Berning

Grieving Lessons

by Julia Grass
May 4, 2012

Over five decades of exuberant shape-shifting across the fictional landscape, Anne Tyler has cut the steady swath of a literary stalwart, writing novel after novel whose most memorable characters inhabit a cosmos all their own, a contemporary meta-­Baltimore populated by ordinary if idiosyncratic citizens, middle-class homebodies cocooned yet smothered by their families. What makes each story distinctive is the particular way its characters rebel against hereditary confines, cope with fateful crises or forge relationships with new acquaintances who rock their world.

Tyler must have fans who can peg a life’s joys and trials to her books: backpacked through Greece with “A Slipping-Down Life,” honeymooned with “Celestial Navigation,” juggled “The Accidental Tourist” with nursing infant, maintained sanity with “Breathing Lessons” while negotiating cutthroat divorce, lost self in “Ladder of Years” during chemo infusions, was downloading “Noah’s Compass” when phone rang with news of first grandchild. My introduction to Tyler was, as for so many readers, “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.” I opened it on a People Express flight from Newark to Burlington, Vt., in 1983. Somewhere over New England, I fell in love. I was captivated, charmed and moved. How captivated readers will be by Tyler’s 19th novel, “The Beginner’s Goodbye,” may depend in part on how receptive they are to ghosts — more precisely, to the notion that a loved one can loiter with us beyond death because of “unfinished business.”

Anne Tyler / The Beginner's Goodbye / Review

Anne Tyler

The Beginner's Goodbye 

by Anne Tyler

REVIEWED BY KATHLEEN BYRNE

SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

PUBLISHED MAY 6, 2012UPDATED MAY 1, 2018

Making my way through The Beginner's Goodbye, the latest offering from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Anne Tyler, I found myself thinking about Baltimore, Md. Not the Baltimore that is, traditionally, Tyler territory, a quasi-bucolic outcrop of lawns and trees and neighbours who, on the whole, tend not to be drug lords or addicts or hookers; rather, the Baltimore of The Wire, the now-defunct HBO crime drama that gave us a bullet-riddled, blood-spattered, boarded-up dystopia so beyond bounds that the very notion of probity became suspect.

Anne Tyler / Noah´s Compass / Review

Review: Noah's Compass, by Anne Tyler

REVIEWED BY KATHLEEN BYRNE

SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

PUBLISHED JANUARY 29, 2010UPDATED MAY 1, 2018

The 100 best novels / No 96 / Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1988)

Something clutches at the heart in the opening pages of Noah's Compass, the latest offering from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Anne Tyler. It's not just that Liam Pennywell, the protagonist, at 60 is laid off, divorced, apparently alone in the world and, within a week of being downsized, has swapped his large, old-fashioned, dignified apartment for a cinderblock box on the outskirts of Baltimore.

Anne Tyler / ‘I have always wanted to time-travel’

Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler 

‘I have always wanted to time-travel’

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 13, 2015UPDATED MAY 12, 2018

This article was published more than 5 years ago. Some information in it may no longer be current.

The 100 best novels / No 96 / Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1988)

This week, Anne Tyler published her 20th novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, which tells the story of a Baltimore family, the Whitshanks, over the course of three generations. Tyler has won a host of awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, since publishing her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, in 1964. Her other books include The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Back When We Were Grownups.

Book review: Anne Tyler's 'Clock Dance' a delight in print or audio

By Linda C. Brinson

Special to the News & Record
Jul 29, 2018

The 100 best novels / No 96 / Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1988)

“Clock Dance” is Anne Tyler at her best, and that is very good. A much-honored author of more than 11 novels, Tyler won the Pulitzer Prize for her 11th novel, “Breathing Lessons,” published in 1988.

Anne Tyler

She may be the best American writer mining the fertile field of families, of how people interact over time with the ones they are supposed to love, and how those interactions shape them.

“Clock Dance” is not as laugh-out-loud funny as some of Tyler’s earlier books, but it certainly has plenty of humorous moments, some of them wryly humorous. And, it is full of the wisdom and perspective that Tyler has gleaned as she has written and lived. Now 76, she has much to offer readers, and “Clock Dance” serves up her rich, gentle, often amusing insights in a captivating story.

Top 10 runaway mothers in fiction

From Nancy Mitford’s ‘the Bolter’ – so named for her serial monogamy – to the mother of Kramer vs Kramer, here are the best mums on the run

Laura Lippman
Wed 21 March 2018

Do all mothers fantasise about fleeing their families, if only for a weekend? Or do we simply crave the vicarious thrill of reading about something we know we’ll never do? I’ve long been obsessed with runaway mother stories, relatively rare in fiction. Gone Girl? Sure. Gone Mommy? Not so much. A woman who leaves her family is seen as starkly unnatural. Maybe that’s why so many of my favourite runaway novels play the subject for laughs, or relegate it to a subplot.

Still, I have long wanted to play with this trope and use it for a straight-up crime novel, one as dark as I could imagine. What kind of woman leaves her family? That’s the question that animated my new book Sunburn, but it’s also central to these 10 very different novels.

1. Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler
This wry, big-hearted novel is quintessential book club fodder, meant to be dissected with other women, preferably over wine and snacks. Delia Grinstead, still somewhat unformed at the age of 40, bolts from her family on a beach vacation, only to find a new life caring for the child of another runaway mother. This is Tyler at her best, which is as good as it gets.

2. Kinflicks by Lisa Alther
This hilarious 1976 debut centres on one woman’s flirtations with many personae, almost all dictated by her partner and/or mentor of the moment. Ginny Hull Babcock frames her life as a Hegelian odyssey of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, but she finds being the mother of a toddler particularly challenging. Technically, Ginny’s husband throws her out, but she doesn’t return to fetch her daughter.

3. The Women’s Room by Marilyn French
In French’s seminal novel about second-wave feminists at Harvard, the main character, Mira, leaves her two sons with her ex-husband when she decides to attend graduate school. But their relationship actually improves when she pursues her own dreams. By the end, Mira is bitter and disappointed, but she has solid relationships with both her sons.

Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman and Justin Henry in the 1979 film adaptation of Avery Corman’s novel Kramer vs Kramer. Photograph: Tom Wargacki

4. Kramer vs Kramer by Avery Corman

This 1977 novel has aged better than I expected. Corman does his best to find empathy for Joanna Kramer, the mother who flees and then returns to demand full custody of the son she abandoned. After an acrimonious trial, the judge grants her wish, and then she decides she doesn’t want her son after all – a maddeningly convenient “happy” ending for her ex-husband. Is it a happy ending for the child, though? Corman seems to think so.

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 Gone Mommy … Maria Semple. Photograph: Elke Van de Velde

5. Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

It’s hard to write a hilarious Gone Mommy book, but Semple pulled it off in this sly 2012 novel. Semple uses a wide sampling of written formats – report cards, correspondence, school memos, police reports – to craft this ultimately empathic portrait of an overwhelmed woman weighed down by her past.

6. Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
For years, I thought this classic “sensation novel” was the invention of an American children’s writer, Maud Hart Lovelace, who used it as an example of a salacious “dime store” novel. It’s not only a real novel, it’s based on a real woman: Constance Kent. Decried by some in its time, Lady Audley’s Secret is now taught in universities as a feminist classic. Elaine Showalter, writing in the London Review of Books, noted: “While [Braddon] condemns Lady Audley’s crimes, Braddon also hints … that women are frustrated and destructive because they are confined to passive domestic lives.”

7. Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg
June Reid has holed up in a seaside motel thousands of miles from her home, determined not to tell her story. After losing her entire family and her boyfriend in a tragic accident, June has lost any sense of herself. It turns out that someone can be a runaway mother even when she no longer has a family to escape. This novel slowly and gracefully answers the question in its title.

8. A Mother and Two Daughters by Gail Godwin

This novel follows its titular characters in the year after the death of the family patriarch. Lydia Mansfield, the younger, usually dutiful daughter, decides to leave her marriage and only takes one of her two sons with her. She believes her decision is merely pragmatic – her older son prefers living in the family house, while the younger one needs more supervision – and is shocked to discover that the school psychologist sees her as a selfish, indifferent mother. It’s a small plot point in a sprawling, satisfying book about three women recalibrating their identities.

9. Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt

When I taught creative writing in college and asked students what they read for pleasure, Voigt’s name came up time and again. Homecoming is the first book in the so-called Tillerman cycle and it begins with four siblings being abandoned in a shopping mall parking lot. It falls to the eldest, 13-year-old Dicey, to keep the family intact. The saga spans seven books; the mother’s mysterious disappearance is resolved in the second, when it’s revealed she’s a catatonic patient in a psychiatric hospital.

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 ‘The Bolter’ … played by Frances Barber in a BBC adaptation. Photograph: Gary Moyes/BBC1

10. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

With their mother known as “the Bolter” due to being a serial monogamist, how will her daughters learn to make good choices in their own relationships? That’s an inevitable question in this 1945 comic novel, about which Zoë Heller wrote: “But beneath the brittle surface of Mitford’s wit there is something infinitely more melancholy at work – something that is apt to snag you and pull you into its dark undertow when you are least expecting it.” Heller theorises that Pursuit is a love-it-or-hate-it book – making it a lot like runaway mothers, whom we either sympathise with or revile.

THE GUARDIAN