Micah Mortimer, the strikingly unproactive protagonist of Anne Tyler’s 23rd novel, is a man of such unswerving routine that his rare moments of whimsy — slipping into a foreign accent on Mondays when the week turns to floor-cleaning and ‘zee dreaded moppink’ — come to seem like unfathomable caprice. Indulging a sudden hankering for a takeaway barbecue is as wild to him as one of Hunter S. Thompson’s most lurid binges. The reasons for his cautious mundanity are unclear: he emerged from a chaotic family, but so did his convivial, cheerful sisters; he’s no stranger to romantic disappointment, but then who is?
Now in his forties and scraping a living fixing the tech queries of mainly elderly Baltimore residents while acting as a handyman for his unglamorous apartment block, Micah does not question his lifestyle or his character, and shrugs off the attempts of those supposedly close to him to suggest refinements or enhancements to his behaviour and habits. Tyler’s skill is to make sure that readers can see his point while simultaneously cringing at his tin ear. After all, if the girlfriend you’re frankly lucky to have tells you she’s about to be evicted, reassuring her that the rental market is buoyant is a misstep. Tyler writes:
Sometimes when he was dealing with people he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove.
Well, yes: but ‘people’ aren’t supposed to include your girlfriend and your family.
Redhead by the Side of the Road — its title a reference to the tendency of Micah’s ageing eyes to mistake inanimate objects for human beings when he’s out running — is a noticeably compact novel, studded with miniature portraits of other lives.
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