“They had it down to a system, you could say.” Even his relationship with Cassie, his woman friend (Micah refuses to call anyone in their 30s a “girlfriend”), is hedged with unspoken rules. His domestic chores are strictly timetabled. Now he scrapes a living running a one-man computer repair business, Tech Hermit, and moonlights as caretaker of his rundown building, fixing broken switches and putting out the rubbish.
Micah was once the family star, the first ever to go to college. Redhead by the Side of the Road is slighter and more bittersweet than some of her recent novels but, like all her work, it tenderly opens an ordinary life and shows us the universal truths hidden inside. Tyler, of course, chooses nothing of the sort. Here he is, Micah Mortimer, your textbook generic, middling man – if that is the way you choose to take him. Tyler claims not to read her reviews but, as her fiction proves, she misses nothing: a thread of steeliness runs through her determinedly unshowy prose. In 2015, New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani disparaged the Whitshank family in the Booker-shortlisted A Spool of Blue Thread as “merely generic figures in a middling middlebrow novel: oddly lacking in emotional specificity and psychological ballast”. It is also, possibly, a sly riposte to her harshest critics. “Nobody knows if he has family.” In her opening two pages, Tyler appears to write her protagonist off as scarcely worth the bother of curiosity.įor a novelist who has spent more than 50 years capturing in detail the lives and hearts of ordinary people, this brief, judgmental pulling of focus is startling. There is a girlfriend of sorts but no sign of male friends. Mortimer, she tells us with the breezy offhandness of a gossipy neighbour, has a basement apartment (“it is probably not very cheery”), scruffy clothes, poor posture and an unvarying daily routine.
“Y ou have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer,” Anne Tyler declares at the start of Redhead by the Side of the Road.
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