Redhead by the Side of the Road (2020)

I had mixed feelings about this Anne Tyler novel. I enjoyed it but it's hard to miss that lots of the characters and themes are familiar: a middle-aged man locked into his routines and limited ambition, the eccentrics around him who are not as inhibited, his attempt to come to terms with himself, and, of course, Baltimore. There is a little bit here from The Accidental Tourist and a little bit from A Patchwork Planet. For better or worse, there's a definite sense in the basic elements of a generic Anne Tyler. Mostly I enjoyed it. It had more substance than some of her others in this century. In fact, a Kirkus review found it "suffused with feeling and very moving." A review on Goodreads was closer to my reaction. The reviewer, Marchpane, liked it in spite of misgivings about a number of weak points. She notes the novel is affecting but mentions Tyler is 78 now and having a hard time hiding her age in some ways. For example, Micah Mortimer, the main character here, runs a solo business as a computer handyman, but Marchpane notes that his "clients come to him with tech problems from the 1990s.... Meanwhile all the characters seem like they are from several decades earlier." That's all true although I actually liked the thread about Micah's work, partly because it was a route that fleetingly appeared viable for me circa 2007. And I want to say, contra Marchpane, that some of these problems are more like from the 2000s, Wi-Fi and such, but I take the point and it makes me worry a little about my own antiquating views of things. But all that said, everyone seems to end up liking Redhead by the Side of the Road and I did too. It's quite short—Marchpane also argues it should have been a shorter story or a longer novel and that might be right too. That led me to notice on Wikipedia that Tyler has actually published a number of short stories, which have never been collected. That might be a project for someone—some of them are from her best years and in venues like The New Yorker. I didn't find Redhead by the Side of the Road to be as good as 2016's Vinegar Girl (which is her best of the past decade, I think) but it's a little better than 2018's Clock Dance.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.