
While Micah’s cool indifference occasionally feels like a symptom of Tyler’s spare, detached style, his moments of growth bring satisfaction.

Bursting with vitality and variety, it’s a tour de force display -funny, sharply aler of Tyler’s acute enthralment with social interactions and idiosyncratic personalities.… novel fizzes with the qualities-characters who almost leap off the page with authenticity, speech and body language wonderfully caught-that, for more than half a century, have won her such admiration and affection.Ī compassionate, perceptive novel….

It’s the wealth of brilliantly caught characters that’s her book’s greatest appeal…. Tyler rarely disappoints, but this is her best novel in some time-slender, unassuming, almost cautious in places, yet so very finely and energetically tuned, so apparently relaxed, almost flippantly so, but actually supremely sophisticated.… Tyler’s ability to make you care about her characters is amazing, and never more so than here. His inability to do so suffuses this poignant book with almost unbearable loneliness.Įading this enjoyable novel-her 23rd-it struck me that there can’t be a writer, of either gender, who creates more engaging or multi-dimensional men…. As in a short story, each observation, each detail, carries meaning… like so many Anne Tyler characters over the years, Micah Mortimer has trouble seeing what is right in front of his eyes. Tyler’s brief novel covers just a few weeks in Micah’s life and it moves so quickly and seamlessly you might think it slight. A master at the small domestic moments that stand in for large and universal truths, Tyler never disappoints. every quirky character… is a vintage Tyler portrait, fully drawn…. ( From the publisher.Tyler wastes neither sentence nor scene…. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah's meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.Īn intimate look into the heart and mind of a man who finds those around him just out of reach, and a funny, joyful, deeply compassionate story about seeing the world through new eyes, Redhead by the Side of the Road is a triumph, filled with Anne Tyler's signature wit and gimlet-eyed observation. A sparkling new novel about misperception, second chances, and the sometimes elusive power of human connection.Ī self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life.īut one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late thirties a "girlfriend") tells him she's facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son.
