![]() Certainly, in Micah, she’s created a man to puzzle and worry about, to ache and to root for. But in fact it’s a tale of someone who has opted out, who has doggedly failed to engage, who’s made a habit of walking away from almost everything.īut Tyler’s ability to make you care about her characters is amazing, and never more so than here. It appears at first sight to be a novel about a good and well-meaning man – a man who, as Micah brokenly tells his girlfriend, set out to “make no mistakes at all”. 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. He tries skipping his customary shower and shave, but – and here’s how to nail the essence of a character in one deft stroke – can’t seem to come up with “any further ways to indulge himself”. Alone again – and uneasily aware of the “nagging ache in the hollow of his chest” – he wonders why his rigid routines suddenly don’t feel quite so comforting. But even given a second chance, he wasn’t sure what he’d do differently” – Micah sends him packing. Meanwhile, managing to misread his teenage guest with equal aplomb – “he had handled this all wrong, he realised. Tyler’s ability to make you care about her characters is amazing, and never more so than here Unsurprisingly, she declares the relationship over. Wholly unrealising – “he hated it when women expected you to read their minds” – Micah jokes that she could always sleep in her car. At the same time, Micah’s girlfriend, suddenly threatened with eviction from her own apartment, is clearly waiting to be asked to move in. Having managed to convince himself that Micah might actually be his real father, he has – to the latter’s consternation – soon inveigled himself into the spare room. First the disaffected, fatherless teenage son of Micah’s high-school sweetheart turns up on his doorstep. Still, it’s hard to remember when she last exploded it to such satisfying and disarming effect. ![]() For it is after all a perennial Tyler theme: the decent, mundane, settling-for-less kind of life whose uneasy decorum is suddenly exploded by the random, the uncontrolled, the latent sense of what might have been. No long-term reader of Tyler will be surprised to hear that all of this careful, oddball living, this unswerving rigidity, is about to be thrown furiously and entertainingly off balance. Nevertheless, as he regularly reassures himself, he has “no reason to feel unhappy”. Even his relationship with his “restful to look at” teacher girlfriend has, by his own admission, “solidified”. He lives rent-free, alone, keeps to himself and sticks to a routine “etched in stone”: Friday is vacuuming day, Monday floor-mopping, and so on. So his second day-job is as apartment caretaker and general odd-job man. Micah knows that his modestly selling manual, the delectably titled “First, Plug It In”, is unlikely to make him rich. After he walked away from an IT startup, Micah now runs Tech Hermit and runs around the neighbourhood fixing computer problems for old ladies who – and you’d be right to bet Tyler mines this for full comic potential – don’t know what a modem is or does. Aren’t some of her most memorable and satisfying novels those where she plumbs the male human heart and psyche with all of her customary tenderness and honesty? Who can forget Saint Maybe ’s self-lacerating Ian Bedloe, or the poles-apart brothers from Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant ? Or – probably my favourite – the heart-wrenched Macon Leary in The Accidental Tourist?Īnd now – chiming eerily at least in name with Macon – here’s fortysomething Micah, blue-eyed, with “not-so-good posture”, clad in jeans and a “partially erased looking” brown leather jacket. But reading 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. A nne Tyler has won so many plaudits over the past 50 odd years that it’s hard to think of new superlatives to add.
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