Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler Could Make Even Quarantined Lives Feel Expansive and Lovely

The author’s 23rd novel Redhead By the Side of a Road follows a small life and makes it meaningful—who can’t relate these days?

Bobby Finger
April 1, 2020


The latest novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Tyler, ends just as all her others have, which is to say it delivers upon its protagonist a moment of profound, much-deserved hope. In this case, the recipient is Michah Mortimer, a “tall, bony man in his early forties” who owns a one-man tech support business. This is by no means a spoiler. That her endings have a consistency of tone is a hallmark of Tyler’s writing, and the reason Redhead By the Side of the Road–out April 7–is so well-timed.

I fell for Tyler and her soothing bibliography only recently, after she was recommended to me by a friend who happens to be this publication’s Chief Critic. (A reliable source.) “I think you’ll like her,” he told me late last summer. Today, less than a year later, I’ve read all 22 of her novels, and felt the same peace each time I arrive at another ending. Redhead is no exception, despite its modest size and scope.

Tyler tends to focus on the dynamics of large, middle-class American families– the relationships between parents and their children, the grudges between those children and their siblings, and the reverberations of generations past, despite a person’s best efforts to escape them. She thrives in big, creaky old houses bursting at the seams with people (even if only on special occasions) and provides detailed histories for her characters in lengthy, chapter-length flashbacks. But Redhead, in its 192 pages, keeps Michah’s jogging feet firmly in the present. His quirky family takes center stage only briefly, which allows Michah to spend a great deal of this novel talking to himself in his spartan North Baltimore apartment (where he also works as its super) or chatting with just one other person. Among his occasional run-ins are his girlfriend Cass, a schoolteacher on the verge of homelessness after violating the terms of her lease by adopting a cat; Yolanda, a neighbor whose maintenance troubles are no match for her romantic ones; Brink, a college freshman who shows up on his doorstep claiming to be his son; and Lorna, the boy’s mother, with whom Michah had a relationship decades earlier.

The question of Brink’s paternity is resolved rather quickly, as Tyler is once again focused more on robust character portraits than fussy things like plot twists. Life, as my favorite novels of hers prove, is extraordinary enough without them. (Begin with Ladder of Years if you’re new here.) The mother and son’s arrival does, however, cause Michah to become more introspective when they depart. His relationship with Cass begins to flounder, and even his exercise routine no longer brings him the peace it once did. One of the many unmovable aspects of his routine, daily runs used to offer him a moment to take in the familiar, comforting sights of his neighborhood as well as the pleasure of eavesdropping on the strangers he whooshed past. But now they lead to nothing but jarring self-examination. “He felt like a starving man, staring longingly at a feast,” Tyler writes of a run that brings him to the titular redhead by the side of the road. I won’t describe that person’s significance further; another pleasure of Tyler’s novels is arriving at the moment when the metaphor of her title–when there happens to be one–suddenly makes itself known.

 And that’s it, really. Michah keeps fixing things for his tenants and clients, all the while choosing not to fix himself. He takes on the problems of others while ignoring those affecting him. He visits his siblings and ignores their boisterous and biting commentary on his personal life. (“He liked his family a lot. But they made him crazy sometimes.”)

“You have to wonder what goes through the mind of such a man,” Tyler writes, revealing her authorial impulse to focus on these sorts of modest character studies. And how thankful I am that she’s still doing the wondering, some 56 years after her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes Her piercing omniscience is on full, enthralling display here, and you savor the revelations she doles out during, say, lunch, when Michah notices Lorna, now a successful lawyer, slipping back into the lower-class accent she had when they met. “It was the word ‘nary’ that did it,” Tyler writes. “That telltale trace of country poking out of her speech like a thorn.”

Later, Yolanda explains to Michah why she, a single and lovesick fifty-something, keeps going on internet dates even though they never work out. “I think I do it for the pre stage,” she says. “The stage where I’m planning what to wear and putting on my makeup, thinking this time things might work out. And when they don’t, I’m like, Well, at least that part was fun. That part was something.”

Tyler is a brilliant chronicler of human behavior because she understands that every part is something to someone. Even those somethings that may otherwise be referred to as, simply and pejoratively, “domestic.” Yes, Michah Mortimer’s life is a small one, but as this period of extended quarantine and self-isolation is proving, whose isn’t? Though we have stripped our daily rituals down to their bare essentials, we remain as big and as loving and as scared and as frustratingly human as we were before the world outside screeched to a halt. Redhead By the Side of the Road is a delicate and moving reminder of this, and proves Tyler’s voice remains as vital as ever.

Lately I’ve been imagining the plot of an Anne Tyler novel about a family stuck inside their Baltimore home during a pandemic. Its particulars are muddled and messy imitations of her voice, but I have a feeling I’ve got the ending down pat. There will be a person, and that person will discover a glimmer of hope inside them–perhaps it had always been there, you know? At any rate, they will look around their home–the one they’ve lived in for decades–and notice that it's suddenly a little lovelier and more comfortable than they ever gave it credit for, just before looking out the window and taking a quiet moment to delight in life’s uncanny ability to go on.

VANITY FAIR