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With novel after novel Anne Tyler has moved and enchanted an ever-growing audience of critics and readers. And now, in her tenth work of fiction-her first since her best-selling and glowingly acclaimed Dinner at the Home- sick Restaurant-she gives us her most absorbing work.
The time is now. The place is the Baltimore Anne Tyler has made her own. Her protagonist is Macon Leary, and he is the prototype of the "accidental tourist." He hates travel. Which is why he is so singularly equipped to make his living as the anonymous author of a series of chunky, passport-size guidebooks called Accidental Tourist in
whose logo is a comfortable armchair with wings, and whose ideal reader is the businessman abroad who longs for a king-size Beautyrest in Madrid, a taste of Sweet'n Low in Tokyo, and a restaurant in Rome that will serve Chef Boyardee.
Macon is someone who himself travels through life accidentally. Things just happen to him-he doesn't seek them out. His only child has been killed in a senseless accident; his wife for no apparent reason asks for a separation, leaving him to fend for himself, a broken leg conveniently thrusts him back home with his sister and brothers in the family house where he started out. Surely it is an accident that he gets involved with the astonishing Muriel, the frizzy-haired, stiletto-heeled, nonstop talker who does the bookings at the kennels where Macon boards his unmanageable Welsh corgi, Edward, when he has to go on one of his fact-finding trips.
But gradually what seems like accident is tinged with purpose, and the comfortably familiar is disturbed by the impulse toward escape. Only Anne Tyler with her instinct for getting at the wonderful, irrational underside of human nature, for playing out this tension that is at the heart of the real adventure of life-could make the education of Macon Leary so irresistible. From the first page to the last, it is a novel that, as Benjamin DeMott wrote of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, is "beautiful funny, heart-hammering, wise."
The time is now. The place is the Baltimore Anne Tyler has made her own. Her protagonist is Macon Leary, and he is the prototype of the "accidental tourist." He hates travel. Which is why he is so singularly equipped to make his living as the anonymous author of a series of chunky, passport-size guidebooks called Accidental Tourist in
whose logo is a comfortable armchair with wings, and whose ideal reader is the businessman abroad who longs for a king-size Beautyrest in Madrid, a taste of Sweet'n Low in Tokyo, and a restaurant in Rome that will serve Chef Boyardee.
Macon is someone who himself travels through life accidentally. Things just happen to him-he doesn't seek them out. His only child has been killed in a senseless accident; his wife for no apparent reason asks for a separation, leaving him to fend for himself, a broken leg conveniently thrusts him back home with his sister and brothers in the family house where he started out. Surely it is an accident that he gets involved with the astonishing Muriel, the frizzy-haired, stiletto-heeled, nonstop talker who does the bookings at the kennels where Macon boards his unmanageable Welsh corgi, Edward, when he has to go on one of his fact-finding trips.
But gradually what seems like accident is tinged with purpose, and the comfortably familiar is disturbed by the impulse toward escape. Only Anne Tyler with her instinct for getting at the wonderful, irrational underside of human nature, for playing out this tension that is at the heart of the real adventure of life-could make the education of Macon Leary so irresistible. From the first page to the last, it is a novel that, as Benjamin DeMott wrote of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, is "beautiful funny, heart-hammering, wise."