Micah does everything precisely and on schedule, and he prides himself on following the rules even when nobody is watching. He has a girlfriend, Cass, but “they seem to live fairly separate lives,” Tyler notes. Micah lives in the basement apartment of a building where he is the handyman, and he also runs a one-man company called Tech Hermit, doing computer repair in people’s homes. Tightly wound, bound to routine, blind to the cues that the universe sends him, in midlife he’s getting lonelier without quite understanding why.
Men such as Macon Leary, the Accidental Tourist who hated leaving home or slow-moving, deliberate Ezra Tull, who ran the Homesick Restaurant and dreamed of giving everyone a home-cooked meal.īut Micah Mortimer in Tyler’s new novel, “Redhead by the Side of the Road,” might be her saddest oddball yet. “Gentle, bumbling men,” a critic for Kirkus Reviews once called them. Her men are mostly oddball misfits, a little out of step with the world. Tyler’s women are mostly vivacious and chatty, with flyaway hair and a zest for life.
Book by book, over her 55-year career, novelist Anne Tyler has built a literary portrait of Baltimore and populated it with quirky, warmly human characters.
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