“REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD”
By Anne Tyler
Knopf ($26.95)
It’s rare these days to hear anyone grumble, “Boy, I wish that book (or movie) were longer.” But I would say that about “Redhead by the Side of the Road,” Anne Tyler’s 23rd novel.
At 178 pages, it is far shorter than the recent “Clock Dance” or “A Spool of Blue Thread.” Manuscript length doesn’t guarantee reader satisfaction and Ms. Tyler either has become fashionably economical in her writing or simply decided this story needed no excess embroidery.
I would rather be left wanting more than dreading more, and it’s a tribute to Ms. Tyler (one of my favorite authors) to wish to linger longer in her fascinating fictional universe. If, in December, we might sing, “We need a little Christmas right this very minute,” in pandemic panic we might warble that we need or could surely use a little Anne Tyler.
“Redhead” is set in north Baltimore where Micah Mortimer, 43, is not just a creature of habit but a near slave to it. He lives alone, runs a one-man computer repair business called Tech Hermit and serves as superintendent of the small apartment building where he resides in the basement unit. Like a 1950s housewife, he does chores such as floor-mopping, dusting and vacuuming, on certain days of the week.
For the past three years he has had a “woman friend” — “he refused to call anyone in her late thirties a ‘girlfriend’ ” — named Cass, an elementary school teacher. “They had reached the stage where things had more or less solidified: compromises arrived at, incompatibilities adjusted to, minor quirks overlooked. They had it down to a system, you could say.”
But the system breaks down when Cass fears losing her apartment and a teenage boy unexpectedly shows up at Micah’s. The stranger is the son of a college sweetheart and arrives with assumptions and difficult or impossible to answer questions, further throwing Micah’s well-ordered life for a loop.
“Redhead” takes its title not from a person but a telltale mistake. Micah makes his daily runs without his eyeglasses and regularly imagines that “a certain fire hydrant, faded to the pinkish color of an aged clay flowerpot, was a child or a very short grown-up.”
His misreading of certain situations — and people — is at the heart of this story that asks if second chances are desirable or even possible. What happens if a well-ordered life also means a lonely, empty one? Can you, essentially, put on your glasses to sharpen or correct the view of what is right in front of you?
The 78-year-old author, whose 11th novel “Breathing Lessons” won the Pulitzer Prize, has lost none of her touch with crisp, lively descriptions of characters and families, forged by biology, happenstance or fortunate error.
Micah has four sisters who have a “boundless tolerance for clutter.” Their lives and houses are messy and a brother-in-law teases Micah as only a relative can. “Is it vacuuming day? Is it dusting day? Is it scrub-the-baseboards-with-a-Q-tip day?”
Sometimes messiness cannot be avoided in homes or in life; in fact, it might be downright desirable. And sometimes 178 pages is enough to examine a world that expands, contracts and, like a balky computer, just might be ready for a reboot.
Barbara Vancheri is former movie editor of the Post-Gazette. She reviewed a handful of previous Tyler novels and movie adaptations.
First Published: April 3, 2020, 2:00 p.m.