Alex Clark

Even Anne Tyler can’t make a solitary Baltimore janitor sound interesting

Micah, in Redhead by the Side of the Road, is a creature of habit — and when a stranger turns up claiming to be his son, we remain underwhelmed

Anne Tyler. Credit: Getty Images 
issue 04 April 2020

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.

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