On his morning runs (at precisely 7:15 a.m.), nearsighted Micah often mistakes - just for an instant - a certain red fire hydrant for a redheaded child “or a very short grownup.” Later, he mistakes a newspaper box for a toddler in a bulky jacket. You would be wrong.Īs in a short story, each observation, each detail, carries meaning: Micah’s smudged glasses the encroaching disorder in his pristine apartment his stuck-in-the-past calendar his dreams about babies. Tyler’s brief novel covers just a few weeks in Micah’s life and it moves so quickly and seamlessly you might think it slight. “ ‘Ah, now,’ he said, teasing her, ‘why do that when you’ve got a car of your own you can live in?’ ” “Redhead by the Side of the Road” by Anne Tylerīut does Micah take the hint? No, not ever, not even when Cass worries that eviction might mean she’ll end up living in her grandmother’s car. Every one of them is trying to get him to see the world differently. And all kinds of minor characters - Micah’s chaotic siblings, the tenants in his building, some of his computer clients - make it clear they’d like to be more involved in his life. A teenage boy named Brink knocks on Micah’s door and announces that he is Micah’s son. “If thirty-five miles per hour really meant thirty-eight, they ought to go ahead and say thirty-eight,” he thinks.īut several things happen to shake up his rigid routine: Cass is facing eviction and might need a place to live. Micah does everything precisely and on schedule, and he prides himself on following the rules even when nobody is watching. He has a girlfriend, Cass, but “they seem to live fairly separate lives,” Tyler notes. Micah lives in the basement apartment of a building where he is the handyman, and he also runs a one-man company called Tech Hermit, doing computer repair in people’s homes.
Tightly wound, bound to routine, blind to the cues that the universe sends him, in midlife he’s getting lonelier without quite understanding why. 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.īut Micah Mortimer in Tyler’s new novel, “Redhead by the Side of the Road,” might be her saddest oddball yet. “Gentle, bumbling men,” a critic for Kirkus Reviews once called them. Her men are mostly oddball misfits, a little out of step with the world. Tyler’s women are mostly vivacious and chatty, with flyaway hair and a zest for life. 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.
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