A Patchwork Planet (1998)

This is one by Anne Tyler that seemed to me not so easy to get a bead on. On the one hand it's as compulsively readable as anything by her; I have now found myself twice rip-roaring through it in short order. Its first-person story of Barnaby Gaitlin the poor little rich boy and black sheep of a wealthy family of Baltimore philanthropists has all the usual Tyler hallmarks: quirky lovable characters who bring the pathos, a jumble of amiable incident, and a moderately surprise twist in its ending that satisfies more than not. Gaitlin has rejected his wealthy family nearly as much as they have rejected him, though all remain enmeshed with one another. After some serious problems as a teen, including a late graduation from high school and legal troubles involving burglary charges, he has spent all of his adult life working for Rent-a-Back, which provides manual labor services to the elderly. Gaitlin turns 30 as the novel begins. Divorced from a brief marriage, he has a 9-year-old daughter who lives with her mother and stepfather in Philadelphia. Gaitlin is a bit of a Holden Caulfield, reflexively rejecting anything he identifies as phony. He rents the basement of a home from a family with whom he must share a bathroom. The patriarchal side of his family believes that angels traditionally visit them at portentous points in their lives to deliver fateful messages. Gaitlin believes he may have found his angel in the person of Sophie, who he meets on a train ride between Baltimore and Philadelphia after watching her carry through on a good deed on an earlier train ride. But when they end up involved, Gaitlin is no longer as sure about that. Taken altogether, A Patchwork Planet notably has its oddities, perhaps none greater than Tyler's decision to tell the story first-person by Gaitlin. Over the duration of the novel he seemed to me less and less believable as a man, and indeed begins to come off like one of those Woody Allen characters—philosopher or TV comedy writer or documentary filmmaker—who only sounds like Woody Allen. Gaitlin sounds more and more like the typical garrulous, overfeeling Tyler female with an overlay of pro forma male characteristics, such as a certain degree of handiness with tools. Some of Gaitlin's plaintive declarations and assertions at points started to remind me of Jack Handey Deep Thoughts shtick ("If you go parachuting, and your parachute doesn’t open, and you friends are all watching you fall, I think a funny gag would be to pretend you were swimming"), which brought things dangerously close to capsizing under their own weight at various points. Yet this is also one of Tyler's more tightly constructed and symmetrical plots as well and certainly worth it for any fan.

In case it's not at the library.