Novel of the week
REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD
by Anne Tyler
192PP, CHATTO & WINDUS, £14.99, EBOOK £9.99, AUDIO AVAILABLE
Twenty-three novels in, and the Pulitzer-winning Anne Tyler is still hot on her usual themes: middle-class Americans and their personal relationships. Which is not to damn Tyler at all – her latest book, Redhead by the Side of the Road, is a warm-hearted story of an oddball forced to re-evaluate his life. Set, like most of her novels, in Baltimore, the narrative spans a few days in the small life of Micah Mortimer.
Micah is a freelance IT guy who also moonlights as the caretaker of his apartment building. His “routine is etched in stone” (morning runs, day-specific cleaning jobs), he drives perfectly, giving himself pats on the back from an imagined “Traffic God”, he dislikes weddings (“crowded”) and video games (“disorganised”). His family tease him for being “finicky”, while he thinks them messy: “of course his sisters would choose to be waitresses. Restaurants had the same atmosphere of catastrophe that prevailed in their own homes.”
Catastrophe comes into his life in the form of a teenager called Brink turning up on his doorstep convinced that he’s Micah’s son, and his girlfriend Cass being threatened with eviction from her flat – to which Micah does not respond by asking her to move in with him. He starts thinking about his relationships, past and present: “each new girlfriend had been a kind of negative learning experience”. To him, they’re usually somewhere between a nice backdrop (one of Cass’s outfits is “muted and unexceptional which he approved of without really noticing”) and too much fuss and bother.
And yet we root for this weirdo as he learns not to take people for granted. The novel’s title is a neat image, referring to the faded fire hydrant Micah jogs past every day, each time mistaking it for something it’s not. It’s another excellent portrayal – amused but oddly tender – of a beta-male in crisis. Perhaps not one for restless readers, but there’s a quiet charm to Tyler’s book.