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Summary
Summary
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
"Tyler's novels are always worth scooping up--but especially this gently amusing soother, right now." --NPR
From the beloved Anne Tyler, a sparkling new novel about misperception, second chances, and the sometimes elusive power of human connection.
Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life.
But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late thirties a "girlfriend") tells him she's facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah's meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.
An intimate look into the heart and mind of a man who finds those around him just out of reach, and a funny, joyful, deeply compassionate story about seeing the world through new eyes, Redhead by the Side of the Road is a triumph, filled with Anne Tyler's signature wit and gimlet-eyed observation.
Author Notes
ANNE TYLER was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the author of more than twenty novels. Her twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. Her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A fastidious everyman weathers a spate of relationship stresses in this compassionate, perceptive novel from Tyler (Clock Dance). Micah Mortimer, 43, makes house calls for his Tech Hermit business and moonlights as the superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, where the residents observe his regimented routine and wonder, through Tyler's gossip-inflected narration, "Does he ever stop to consider his life?" The disruptions begin with a call from his schoolteacher girlfriend, Cassia Slade, who is in a panic because she is facing eviction. Then college freshman Brink Adams shows up on his stoop and claims to be his son. Micah knows it isn't true, because he never slept with Brink's mother, Lorna, an old girlfriend, but he tolerates the languid, starry-eyed kid who claims to look up to him for living a working-class life and who fixated on a photo of Micah kept by Lorna. After Micah tries to put Brink in touch with Lorna, he disappears. When Cassia dumps him for not immediately offering to let her move in, Micah descends into a funk that just might push him to prove himself worthy of her companionship. While Micah's cool indifference occasionally feels like a symptom of Tyler's spare, detached style, his moments of growth bring satisfaction. This quotidian tale of a late bloomer goes down easy. Agent: Jesseca Salky, Salky Literary Management. (Apr.)
Booklist Review
If Tyler's large-cast, many-faceted novels, including Clock Dance (2018), are symphonies, this portrait of a man imprisoned by his routines is a concerto. Micah Mortimer emerged from a childhood in a large family and a chaotic household desperate for order and solitude. Now in his forties, he lives in an aggressively neat and clean basement apartment in the Baltimore apartment building in which he serves as super. He is also the Tech Hermit, responding to calls from people needing computer help. He keeps to a strict schedule, which includes some time for his lady friend, Cass, a fourth-grade teacher, but not enough to interfere with his need for privacy. And then, as so often is the case in Tyler's radiantly polished and emotionally intricate tales, someone unexpected and in need appears and disrupts the status quo. Micah's catalyst for panicked self-examination and change is a stranger, Brink, a college freshman inexplicably on the lam. Micah dated Brink's mother long ago, but he's had no contact with her since. What is going on? Tyler's perfectly modulated, instantly enmeshing, heartrending, funny, and redemptive tale sweetly dramatizes the absurdities of flawed perception and the risks of rigidity.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Tyler's warmly comedic, quickly read tale, a perfect stress antidote, will delight her fans and provides an excellent first for readers new to this master of subtle and sublime brilliance.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2020 Booklist
Guardian Review
Anne 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. 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.
Kirkus Review
A man straitjacketed in routine blinks when his emotional blinders are removed in Tyler's characteristically tender and rueful latest (Clock Dance, 2018, etc.).Micah's existence is entirely organized to his liking. Each morning he goes for a run at 7:15; starts his work as a freelance tech consultant around 10; and in the afternoons deals with tasks in the apartment building where he is the live-in super. He's the kind of person, brother-in-law Dave mockingly notes, who has an assigned chore for each day: "vacuuming daydusting day.Your kitchen has a day all its own" (Thursday). Dave's comments are uttered at a hilarious, chaotic family get-together that demonstrates the origins of Micah's persnickety behavior and offers a welcome note of comedy in what is otherwise quite a sad tale. Micah thinks of himself as a good guy with a good life. It's something of a shock when the son of his college girlfriend turns up wondering if Micah might be his father (not possible, it's quickly established), and it's really a shock when his casual agreement to let 18-year-old Brink crash in his apartment for a night leads Micah's "woman friend," Cass, to break up with him. "There I was, on the verge of losing my apartment," she says. "What did you do? Quickly invite the nearest stranger into your spare room." Indignant at first, Micah slowly begins to see the pattern that has kept him warily distant from other people, particularly the girlfriends who were only briefly good enough for him. (They were always the ones who left, once they figured it out.) The title flags a lovely metaphor for Micah's lifelong ability to delude himself about the nature of his relationships. Once he realizes it, agonizing examples of the human connections he has unconsciously avoided are everywhere visible, his loneliness palpable. These chapters are painfully poignantthank goodness Tyler is too warmhearted an artist not to give her sad-sack hero at least the possibility of a happy ending.Suffused with feeling and very moving. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A self-employed tech expert and superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, Micah Mortimer never, ever looks for a change in routine. But when the woman in his life faces eviction and a teenager shows up on his doorstep claiming to be his son, Micah has got to adjust.