Anne Tyler’s works could be described as being from the
school of the comedy of manners, and I’ve made many comparisons in the past of
her work to Jane Austen’s penchant for dissecting societal foibles. Tyler’s writings also embody the mysterious,
the light within her characters, very in keeping with her Quaker upbringing,
and bringing in a touch of magical realism in the dreams of her characters,
including daydreams. Redhead by the Side of the Road has all those
elements. Here are people we all know and
their quotidian lives are ones most of us share in some way. Tyler knows how to engage us.
The life of the protagonist, Micah Mortimer, is yet
another diorama in the Anne Tyler Museum of Damaged Men. He’s an inherently good man but flawed,
essentially a loner, a man of routine. Tyler establishes that right out of the
gate: You have to wonder what goes
through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer.
He lives alone; he keeps to himself; his routine is etched in stone.
That routine involves his three jobs, his work as the
super of a small apartment house for which he has living space in a basement
with a few high windows, his work as the sole proprietor of a computer repair
business, aptly named “Tech Hermit,” for which he has a magnet sign he slaps on
his KIA, and his day to day “work” of living, provisioning, cleaning, dressing,
eating, and a run in the morning. He has a system for every such task, even
commenting out loud in a foreign accent on his housework and having a running dialogue
as he drives with an imaginary “Traffic God” who normally will compliment him
on his prudent driving. Indeed, you
“have to wonder.”
As a computer nerd, he gets business from Google searches
and the notoriety of his one and only published book, First, Plug It In. It was one
of Woolcott Publishing’s better-selling titles, but Woolcott was strictly local
and he didn’t have a hope the book would ever make him rich. Micah Mortimer is a variation on Aaron
Woolcott of Tyler’s A Beginner’s Goodbye.
It is Tyler’s hat tip to that antecedent novel and
character who is the publisher of Woolcott Publishing. By the way, the firm’s best seller is Why I Have Decided to Go On Living. Indeed, the sort of book Micah might have
read!
His girlfriend, if you want to call her that as we’re talking
about people in their 40’s, Cass, is an elementary school teacher, and they’ve
lived together on and off for more than three years. One can understand that a person such as
Micah Mortimer is comfortable with an arrangement that seems to be going
nowhere, but Cass? As Tyler comments, they
had reached the stage where things had more or less solidified: compromises arrive at, incompatibilities
adjusted to, minor quirks overlooked.
They had it down to a system, you could say.
Part of his routine is a run in the morning. All of the action in the novel is in the
familiar territory of most of Tyler’s novels, Baltimore, although I have come
to call her sense of place, ”Tylerville.” He follows the same path on those
runs, out so early in the morning that there is no one around. He likes it like that and finally people
begin to emerge by the time he’s heading home.
It is on such a run, early in the novel, that Tyler departs into the
realm of magic realism, from which the novel derives its title and thus endemic
to the theme. His vision is not very good
so things take on different appearances: On
the homeward stretch this morning, he made his usual mistake of imagining for a
second that a certain fire hydrant, faded to the pinkish color of an aged clay
flowerpot, was a child or a very short grown-up. There was something about the rounded top of
it, emerging bit by bit as he descended a slope toward an intersection. Why! He
always thought to himself. What was that
little redhead doing by the side of the road? Because even though he knew by
now that it was only a hydrant, still, for one fleeting instant he had the same
delusion all over again, every single morning.
Indeed, why that vision, and why does he have dreams
while he sleeps of a baby beckoning to him in supermarket?
Suddenly, the first complication in the novel arises,
Micah finding a young man sitting on his step, Brink Adams. He is the son of a former girlfriend, Lorna
Bartell, from college. He thinks Micah
might be his father. Seeing Brink, who
is really not his son, he remembers that dream:
The image rose up in his mind of
the baby in the supermarket, watching him so expectantly. It occurred to him,
not for the first time, that prophetic dreams were not much use if their
meaning emerged only in hindsight.
He feels, however, a certain responsibility towards Brink
and allows him to stay overnight, Micah urging him to call his mother. He does not.
So Micah says call or leave and leave he does.. Micah immediately suffers regret: He had
handled this all wrong, he realized. But
even given a second chance, he wasn’t sure what he’d do differently. Tyler cuts her protagonist some slack. She does love her characters, even those who
might not act on a second chance.
Allowing Brink to stay over, while Cass was having
apartment house difficulties, creates the next complication, her sudden
decision to break up with Micah. Cass calls
and drops that bombshell because he didn’t offer for her to move in with him
while she was having those apartment issues, and instead, briefly took in this
stranger, Brink, in the office bedroom.
This stuns him, never associating the two. “That never even crossed my mind! I didn’t even know you were willing
to move in! Is that what this is
about? You all at once think we ought to
change the rules?” “No, Micah,” she said. “I know that you are you.” Indeed,
a revelatory statement by Cass. He meekly accepts this judgement putting his
phone into his pocket and staring out into space. He confesses to himself though that he hated it when women expected you to read
their minds.
He remembers when he first met Cass. He was making a tech call at an elementary
school where Cass taught. The class was
not happy that they had to go to a retirement home to Christmas carol,
objecting that the residents “smell bad and
the old ladies keep reaching out to us with their clutchy, grabby hands.” And here Tyler shines in her narrative,
showing her increasing sensitivity to the matter of aging as she has in her
last few novels, as Cass says: "I'd
like you to look at this from another angle. Some of those people get to see
children only once a year at Christmas, when our school comes to carol. And
even the grown-ups they knew are mostly gone. Their parents are gone, their
friends are gone, their husbands or wives gone-whole worlds gone. Even their
brothers and sisters, often. They remember something that happened when they
were, say, nine years old-same age as you all are now-but nobody else alive
remembers it too. You don't think that's hard? You'll be singing to a roomful
of broken hearts, I tell you. Try thinking of that when you decide you don't
want to bother doing it." Ridiculously, Micah had felt touched, although
in his own experience most old people were relentlessly cheery.
On the spot he asks her out to the movies. She
searched his face for a moment. She
seemed to be trying to make up her mind about him…”And I do like going to the
movies,” she said. ..”Well, then,” he told her. And he couldn’t keep from
grinning. It was her speech to the
children that had won him. “A roomful of broken hearts”! He liked that phrase. And so does the reader.
Is it no wonder they then get together? Cass “completes”
him. He just doesn’t really know it, yet. But his family does, all his sisters
wondering where Cass is at a family gathering, vintage Tyler, everyone talking
over everyone else. Tumult, the opposite of Micah’s ordered life. They were
really looking forward to Cass’ appearance as much if not more so than brother
Micah. They are incredulous that Micah
doesn’t grasp the issue. “So, Cass broke up with you because you gave
your guest room to the son of an ex-girlfriend that you don’t even see anymore?” This leave him with the thought: he liked his family a lot, but they made him
crazy sometimes.
And now Tyler has Micah dancing to a cacophony of complications,
guilt over throwing Brink out, guilt about not trying, yet, to find and contact
Brink’s mother, Lorna, guilt about not being sensitive to Cass, and feeling
berated by his family. He starts first
by trying to contact Lorna to let her know her son is safe, tracing her via the
Internet and then emailing her.
The next morning he’s out for his daily run, again
noticing that that early no one is out, and daydreaming what if a neutron bomb
made it permanent? No one for him to
deal with. How idyllic that might be? No complications. No effort to live. He runs in a trance. Until, once again, the hydrant which he
mistakes for a redhead appears, his giving his
usual shake of the shoulders at how repetitious this thought was, how
repetitious all his thoughts were, how they ran in a deep rut and how his
entire life ran in a rut, really.
And really they do.
Lorna does not email or call but arrives, finding his
address by Googling “computer repair” in Baltimore and found “Tech Hermit…it was what the girls in my dorm
used to call you.”…”I guess I’m pretty predictable.” She didn’t disagree.
After discussing the matter of her son with Lorna, she
leaves with her contact numbers if Brink shows up again. He goes out on a
computer call, but returning to his apartment, the place gave off a kind of hollow sound, it seemed to him. Nobody said “You’re home!” Or “Welcome Back.” He finds some of Cass’ overnight clothes and
goes into a reverie about her and her clothes: “The sweater matched her eyes exactly, but when he'd once pointed that out she had said it was the
other way around; her eyes matched the sweater. "Whatever color I wear, my
eyes just go along with it," she'd told him, and then, nudging him
playfully in the ribs, "You should see me when I wear red!"
Remembering that now, he smiled.
Maybe red was a premonition all along? Or the red fire hydrant? And the baby dream? Micah’s sister Ada has an opinion on that
one: it’s a sign from your subconscious
that you’re ready for the next stage of life. But, is he?
Brink indeed returns to Micah’s apartment, agrees to be
picked up by his mom and step dad. Micah
has filled his obligation. Good man. He
and Lorna have a heart to heart about Micah’s opinion that he turns women off, “it’s like all at once they remember
somewhere else they’d prefer to be. But in discussing this with his ex-girl
friend from college, it begins to dawn on him that even their love was not the
perfect one he imagined it to be, and Lorna delivers one of the themes of the
novel: “Sometimess..you can think back on
your life and almost believe it was laid out for you in advance, like this
plain clear path you were destined to take even if it looked like nothing but
brambles and stobs at the time.”
With Cass, Lorna and her son gone, Micah is dreaming
more, becoming more disheveled and Tyler moves into the novel’s denouement with
a gathering momentum as Micah goes through the motions of his Tech Hermit
calls, his apartment house responsibilities, with an inner dialog underway
which is disturbed only by Tyler making a rare departure to the other reality as
he listens to talk radio in the car discussing police violence. It is a brief foray outside the terrarium of
Micah’s world as he struggles with his very identity. The last chapter inexorably, powerfully moves
him towards a resolution, but is it one in which Tyler pushes him further into
damnation or into the light of redemption?
As I was reading this suspenseful chapter, I thought it was going
decidedly in one direction, and I’ll have to leave it there as it would be a
spoiler to reveal my expectations or the reality. It is a remarkable piece of
writing.
Tyler never fails to engage and delight. As I said at the onset, she is our very own
Jane Austen, but with a modern sensibility, and now that both John Updike (who
admired her writing) and Philip Roth are gone she is indisputably one of our leading
writers of fiction. Redhead
by the Side of the Road is vintage Anne Tyler. Her,
now, more than twenty novels a treasure trove of American life observed and deciphered.
