Redhead by the Side of the Road

I love Anne Tyler’s writing, I’ve been reading her books for about 20 years and really enjoy the way she gets under the skin of her characters, describing their mannerisms, speech patterns and other little idiosyncrasies so vividly and recognisably.

The main character in her latest book (a novella really) is Micah Mortimer, a forty-something computer technician (he runs his own one-man company called The Tech Guy). In many ways Micah reminded me of the similarly named Macon in one of Tyler’s earlier novels (and my favourite), The Accidental Tourist. He’s reserved, fastidious and set in his ways (sometimes infuriatingly so), but has a heart of gold.

As often seems to happen in Tyler’s stories, on the surface not a lot seems to be happening but underneath a very real and recognisable human tale is being told. Micah’s interactions with his family, his customers and his poor girlfriend who he drives to distraction with his non-committal, manner, are beautifully observed and delivered with humour and empathy.

Not many authors can make everyday life so interesting and entertaining, and long may Anne Tyler continue to do so.

Spell-binding narrative, as always, from Anne Tyler.
All her characters are fully realised but I am particularly captivated by her male protagonists - and this one is especially endearing, with his imaginary 'Traffic God' commenting on his driving (I have one too).
I think this one is my second favourite novel of hers after 'Breathing Lessons' but there are no duds in any of them. If you haven't read any yet, then what are you waiting for?

Well I honestly wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book as much as I did. I picked it up today to read a chapter or two and before I knew it I was on the last chapter. Admittedly it is a short book probably more of a novella but it really was such a good read. This is way different to what I’d usually read but I was hooked from the first page. This isn’t a fast paced book nor is it one full of suspense but one that just moves along nicely. A lovely descriptive book with great characters and a few laugh out loud moments..

I really enjoyed this short novel. I had such a lovely afternoon reading it. It is gentle but the narrative flows so well. The story is about Micah, a decent guy in his early forties who had high hopes of success as a Computer Science major at college but who has drifted in life and now runs a tech guy service alongside being the janitor of a block of flats for which he receives the free rental of a dismal basement flat. Micah seems attractive to women but his realtionships stall. He is a bit obsessive aboout his routines and structures in his life. He can't see his own faults clearly just as objects have started to seem obscured when he doesn't wear his glasses. One day an 18 year old boy shows up at his apartment, the son of an ex who claims Micah could be his father and he starts to realise a whole heap of things about his life and his behaviour.

A heart-warming and poignant story from one of America’s best authors.
The charming tale of Micah, an eccentric tech expert who receives an unexpected visit from the son of an ex-girlfriend.
Micah reflects on his past relationships and the mistakes he has made while still struggling to understand the lessons to be learnt from his mistakes.
Anne Tyler has the ability to keep the reader hooked while presenting a very gentle story without twists or shocking revelations. Her subtly is the key to her brilliance. She understands human behaviour and writes about it with a delicate precision that is hard to replicate.
If you’ve never read her work before then this is the perfect short introduction. It's classic Anne Tyler. I loved it.
Thank you to NetGalley and Vintage for the copy.

Every time I read a book by Anne Tyler I ask myself the same question........ ‘How does a writer describe the minutiae of the lives of ordinary people is such a way as to make it absolutely absorbing, from the first word until the last?’m The subject of this gently charming book is Micah, a decent man, with tendencies towards obsessive behaviour, and an inability to understand the needs of the people he cares most about. His story is without drama, sudden revelations , twists or turns, yet still manages to hold the reader tight throughout, becoming engaged in his life and hoping against hope that everything will turn out well for him. I read this in one sitting, as I have all Anne Tyler’s other books, and hope that there are many more still to come.

Delightful. Read it in one evening. Time flew. It was so easy and rewarding to read. I laughed out loud quite a few times.
My first Anne Tyler and I have bought more. I loved Micah and his understated story. You could say not much happens and everything does. Ordinary everyday events glow like jewels. You will laugh when you find out ‘who’ the redhead of the title is. We amble with Micah through tech jobs, family meals and dates and really grow to love him and care deeply what happens to him. Luckily it is a happy ending. Thank you #Netgalley for a review copy. This review appears on Amazon and Waterstones.

5+ stars! What can I say? It's Anne Tyler. I loved it. Her unique blend of humour and eccentric characters. Brilliant!

Classic Anne Tyler - Micah, the main protagonist of Redhead by the Side of the Road, is a familiar-feeling misfit to readers of Tyler’s fiction, with a noisy, untidy family who love him but tease him for his odd, ordered life. Brink, the son of Micah’s first love, unexpectedly appears in his life and inadvertently gives him the opportunity to reassess his relationships past and present. This is a beautifully written, rather short and definitely sweet novel.

The story is of the mundane life of Micah, he finds pleasure in order and routine in his daily life. He is more connected to these habits than the relationships with others around him.
His ordered life is thrown awry when he finds someone waiting for his return from his daily run one morning.
Throughout the book you warm to Micah and his ways and also to the small cast of characters that surround him in the story.
Will events pull him out of himself and let him view his ordered world in a different way?

Absolutely love Anne Tyler and absolutely love this book. Her reading of the human mind is extraordinarily accurate and her observational powers remind me of Alan Bennet . The skill of storytelling the gentle love story of Micah and Cass are second to none. The laughed out loud at the bits where Micah was driving... it was almost uncomfortably close to home.

A soothing balm for the soul - Anne Tyler gently takes us through the life of Micah. He has lots of sisters and grew up in a loud, chaotic household. As an adult he likes routines and peace and quiet. However one can get set in ones ways and miss out.

I adore the descriptions of sibling relationships, how Micah deals with a young adult who turns up on his doorstep and how he changes his view on how his life has panned out. Perfect for my current frame of mind. A book by Anne Tyler is always something to look forward to, and this certainly delivers.

Redhead by the Side of the Road is the perfect antidote to the dystopian world we are living in at present. As with other Ann Tyler books it is impossible to describe why a slim book about an average life is so compelling, but it is. In other hands Micah would have been a rather unlovable strange oddball. Tyler makes him a very human individual a kind man with a wry sense of humour, love of family and without in any way presenting him as other than ordinary. The writing is deceptively simple yet beautifully clear and absorbing. Big thanks to Anne Tyler, Random House and Netgalley for providing me with this free ARC and a couple of hours of sheer bliss

This is a masterpiece and Anne Tyler is a genius. It's a quiet novel, a slow meander through someone's life, but somehow Tyler just embodies the life and the details of this person until you're immersed deep in their existence as if she IS Micah, just narrating his life. I genuinely don't know how she does it.

I loved the glimpse into the life of Micah and his family. He seems destined to be alone as another relationship ends. The description of his family is realistic and at times amusing
My only regret is I didn’t read it more slowly

Everything in Micah Mortimer’s life is in the best order imaginable. He has developed his routines of the house chores, of running every morning at exactly the same time before having a shower and eating breakfast. His company “Tech Hermit” provides enough for himself to survive and he is independent in every way. But then one day, his life somehow runs out of control. First, an 18-year-old boy shows up at his door claiming to be his son and then, his girlfriend Cass leaves him unexpectedly. He is not well equipped to deal with this interruption of his routines and certainly not when everybody suddenly seems to be meddling with his love life.

Anne Tyler is a wonderful narrator and thus, also in her most recent novel I got exactly what I had expected. “Redhead by the Side of the Road” is the story of a very peculiar man who seems somehow to go unnoticed when you cross him in the street, who is totally reliable, but also quite predictable. In his Baltimore apartment block, he takes care of everything that needs to be tended to and he seems to be totally ok with his life as he has established it. He shows little interest in matters outside his cocoon and would go on in this way forever if he weren’t interrupted. The author shows that crucial moment, when suddenly everything is put to a test, is questioned and what seems to be perfectly fine turns out to be quite the opposite. He is confronted with the decisions he has made, has to take others’ perspectives and question himself and his habits.

Micah’s obsession with tidiness and order is well explained by the contrast with his chaotic sisters. What the reader sees immediately is that not only are they quite messy and tumultuous in certain ways, but they also seem to be alive. In comparison, Micah is well organised but somehow also lifeless. Nevertheless, they love and support him and would like him to have a fulfilled partnership, their teasing is their way of showing fondness, however, he is not yet at the point of recognising this. It needs another confrontation with his past to fully understand what goes wrong.

He is not a character you immediately sympathise with, but I adored his direct and somehow naive way of addressing people, especially when Brink appears and maybe it is exactly this somehow innocent straightforwardness that makes the boy open up to him.

It is not a novel that goes totally deep with hidden meanings and messages, but without any doubt, it advocates for those nondescript, unimposing characters who have to say much more than you’d expect and it also holds the mirror up to the reader to question what is important in life, where to set the priorities and most of all, to ask yourself if you’re really happy. A moving story that I totally adored to read.

The perfect book for these difficult times. Classic Anne Tyler. Simple yet nuanced and unpredictable.

I love Anne Tyler, and since she announced several years ago that she was publishing her last book, I am overflowing with joy to get the chance to read another- the second to follow that final one! This one is short (too short- but then I can never get enough of Tyler) but exquisite. Micah Mortimer has his way of doing things, his routines, his predictable patterns. He likes quiet, he prefers not to get too involved with the lives of others. He brings to mind Macon Leary from “The Accidental Tourist.” Only when an unexpected visitor sets off a chain of events does he come to realise what he really needs to find contentment. There is not much of a plot to the story, it is all about the characters, with even the minor ones who appear briefly coming to life with their own personality. There is so much truth and compassion here about family, the burden of the past, love and relationships and how we don’t see ourselves and others with a clear eye. Not her best, but still a treat to savour and to think about- with hopefully more yet to come!

What a treat this was to read.

I have heard much about Anne Tyler but this is the first of her books that I have read and it certainly will not be the last.

It is written in such a deceptively simple, spare and straightforward style and it drew me in from the first page.

Her descriptions of characters are so well drawn and evocative and I was rooting for Micah to somehow find the strength and perception to realise how he could improve his life and change his ways.

I will not give away the story - not that in real terms very much happens, but this is a voyage of discovery for Micah as he finally comes to the long overdue realisation that he cannot go through his life trying not to make a mistake. With that revelation suddenly the scales fall away from his eyes and hopefully he finds happiness with the long-suffering Cass.

A pure delight from start to finish. Thank you Anne Tyler.

Maybe as much as twenty years ago I remember a librarian colleague at the University where I was then working saying to me, “Read Anne Tyler”. Most of my time then was given over to reading children’s literature to support one of the courses that I was teaching, but since my retirement I have started to catch up with Tyler’s work and, while I still have some of her back catalogue to read, I have made a point of getting hold of a copy of each new publication as it appeared. Inevitably, some have been better than others, but none have truly disappointed me and her latest, Redhead By The Side Of The Road, to my mind at least, is one of her very best. 

In a recent interview, Tyler commented that she wasn’t very interested in plot, that it got in the way of her real concern which is the development of character, and it is definitely true that Redhead By The Side Of The Road is far more character driven than it is in any way led by its storyline. Central to the narrative is Micah Mortimer, in his forties and living in the basement of an apartment block where he acts as super in between running a small scale business solving other people’s computer problems.  At no point does Tyler mention the fact that Micah has Aspergers.  Well, maybe it takes one to know one, but I can’t imagine that anybody would have any difficulty in recognising his personality type. He had a system she comments.  I’ll say he has a system – for everything, from how he organises his drawers to the days of the week when he mops the floor or cleans the kitchen. And, his system comes first because his system is predictable, it doesn’t ask him to take account of how other people might be feeling, to accept the fact that they may behave in ways that can’t be predicted, perhaps most tellingly to understand that what somebody says and does on the surface may not be a true reflection of what they are actually feeling or expecting from him.

Perhaps Micah’s obsessive tidiness and organisation is a reaction to the family in which he grew up. The youngest child and, as far as I can gather, the only boy, his sisters, their husbands and the ever-growing brood of children and grandchildren live in a type of chaos that I have to say fills me, personally, with horror. Attending an engagement party for one of his nephews, Micah sits down at a table which

itself was bare, except for a portable Ping-Pong net that had been stretched across the centre for the past couple of years or so – long enough, at any rate, so that everyone had stopped seeing it.
I am still shuddering!

But, Micah’s sisters clearly love him and would dearly like to see him married with a family of his own, however, his personality proves to be most obstructive when it comes to forming friendships with women. When we first meet him he’s in a relationship with Grade 4 teacher, Cassia Slade, but we watch as his inability to read the subtext in what she is telling him about her altercation with her landlady leads to the breakdown of the friendship.  (I was going to put “romance” but it really isn’t a word I can use in respect of Micah; it’s so totally foreign to his nature.)  The break-up with Cassie is accelerated by the arrival in his life of Brink, the freshman son of his one-time college girlfriend, Laura. Brink, born out of wedlock and with no knowledge of who is father is, has elected Micah to the position. Simply by virtue of being a teenager, Brink brings chaos to Micah’s life and home, not least because he is hotly pursued both by his mother, his stepfather, Roger and the welter of emotions generated by his departure.  But, it is Roger who suddenly paints Micah’s existence in a completely different light. When Brink admits that he thought Micah might be his father because they appear to have some traits in common, Roger responds:

with a man who earns his own living…Who appears to be self-sufficient. Who works very hard, I assume, and expect no handouts…Sorry, son…but I fail to see the resemblance.
Everything that Roger says about Micah is true, but it is also true that he has allowed his obsession with order and with systems to stand in the way of developing relationships with those outside his own family. It is not that he doesn’t care about other people. His concern for those who live in the apartment block is very apparent, but then they don't impinge upon his personal life.  Recognising that the life he has is not the life he wants, in a final act of true courage, he sets out to try and mend some broken bridges. Whether or not he succeeds you will have to find out for yourself, and please do, because this is truly an excellent piece of writing that should be enjoyed by as many as possible.

With thanks to Random House UK, Vintage Publishing, Chatto & Windus and NetGalley for the review copy

Read this almost in one sitting. Anne Tyler has the remarkable ability to engage the reader from the very first sentence. Relationships are the mainstay of her writing, and this doesn't disappoint.

Another sublime novel by Anne Tyler who so brilliantly depicts the everyday. She builds her stories so delicately and with such telling detail that her depictions of the human condition are both obvious and profound.
In ‘Redhead by the Side of the Road’, we are introduced to Micah, owner of Tech Hermit. Likeable enough, women find him attractive and men enjoy his company. He lives by his routines: a run every morning; a daily housework timetable; cooking decent meals; his duties as caretaker for his building; his IT call outs; time spent with his woman friend, Cass, (he believes that ‘girlfriend’ is ridiculous for fortyish people). He’s a nice guy who acknowledges that he’s set in his ways and he’s fine with that. Then Cass tells him they should end their relationship.
At the same time, the extraordinarily named Brink, eighteen-year-old son of his college girlfriend, Laura, comes searching for Micah. Brink has a few problems: spoilt and angry, he appears to hope that Micah is his real father. Not so, but Micah lets him stay the night and then sends him packing, thinking little more of the boy’s whereabouts. We also meet Micah’s family, made up of his four older, noisy, messy, loving and generous sisters, their spouses, children and grandchildren. Clearly, Micah is keen to live such an organised life because he’s uncomfortable with this chaos!
Over the course of the novella, Micah learns what really makes him happy. During his morning runs he has often mistaken a hydrant by the side of the road for a redheaded child. He recognises ‘how repetitious this thought was, how repetitious all his thoughts were. How they ran in a deep rut and how his entire life ran in a rut, really.’ Tyler shows us that, just by acknowledging this, there’s a possibility that Micah could create a more fulfilling future. She celebrates life’s messiness: people make stupid mistakes, take chances and don’t always get it right. This is a gem of a novel: witty, moving and wise.
My thanks to Random House UK, Vintage Publishing for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.