Book review: ‘Redhead by the Side of the Road’ by Anne Tyler

Rating: ★★★★★

At 78, Pulitzer-winner Anne Tyler is still writing with her customary class and subtle wisdom. "Redhead by the Side of the Road" is another marvellous addition to a back catalogue that includes "Breathing Lessons" and "The Accidental Tourist."

Although the central characters in her new novel are understated — an underachieving computer technician called Micah Mortimer and his occasional lover Cass — they are a deceptively simple vehicle for a shrewd exploration of the way we blunder through life.

Micah is irritating, yet oddly likeable — and you might even agree with his plea for the world to “start running at a manageable speed again.”

Tyler opens and closes the book speaking directly to the reader — “You have to wonder what goes through the mind of such a man,” she writes. “Does he ever stop to consider his life? The meaning of it, the point?”

Like Ezra Tull, like Macon Leary, like so many Anne Tyler characters over the years, Micah Mortimer has trouble seeing what is right in front of his eyes.

His inability to do so suffuses this poignant book with almost unbearable loneliness.

Micah puts up with teasing about his pernickety nature from his brother-in-law (“is it vacuuming day? Is it dusting day? Is it scrub-the-baseboards-with-a-Q-tip day?”), and is baffled by the elusiveness of love and the difficulty of connectivity.

Tyler doesn’t spare her older characters — “sunken” people with “toothpick legs” — but her underlying message is always kind.

In one key scene, teacher Cass is explaining to her young class why they are wrong to be repulsed by the “clutchy” hands of the old ladies they visit in a nursing home.

Cass tells the children they need to be kind to “a roomful of broken hearts.”

The world outside an OAP home is also full of broken hearts, of course, and Micah’s past breaks into his life in an unexpected way, causing all sorts of turbulence.

He is finally forced to confront the truth: that his “entire life is in a rut.”

"Redhead by the Side of the Road"proves again that Anne Tyler is one of modern literature’s true treasures — and the ending is enough to raise anyone’s spirits