Then I remembered how much I had once loved Anne Tyler, and decided I would read her books in sequence. Recently, I searched my house for fresh fiction, and it seemed I didn’t have a single unread novel, though nonfiction is stacked in To-Be-Read towers. Suddenly, Macon didn’t seem all that strange anymore, so I returned to the book.Īnd read another Tyler novel, and another, and another–maybe a dozen in all. But then I thought about some of the people I know, who have made their own adaptations to what I might consider “normal” routines. And so he could sleep in fresh sheets every night without the pesky task of making the bed, he sewed the sheets into envelopes that could just be placed atop the mattress.īy page 15, I was ready to give up reading. He also washed his clothes daily (with his feet) while taking his shower. He began optimizing his life by systematically rethinking and reorganizing his routines, like keeping a popcorn popper and an electric percolator connected to a timer on the bedroom windowsill, so he could awaken to the aromas of coffee and popcorn, his new standard breakfast menu. In fact, his behavior could only be described as bizarre. Macon Leary’s wife had left him after the death of their only son, and Macon wasn’t coping very well. One day while browsing in my neighborhood bookstore, I found a $2.50 pre-read paperback copy and decided to see what all the fuss was about. The movie The Accidental Tourist had come and gone, and I’d never seen it.
Critics applaud the novel's lovingly drawn and compelling characters and Tyler's insight into the complex inner workings of the American family.I discovered the novelist Anne Tyler in the early 1990s. Tyler's intermingling of comedy and tragedy results in a bittersweet tale of loss and recovery. As a result, he realizes that he is in danger of becoming "a dried up kernel of a man that nothing real penetrates." During the course of the novel, however, Macon confronts his suffering and carves out a new life for himself with the help of an energetic and eccentric young woman and her son. In this story, middle-aged travel writer Macon Leary finds himself alone and miserable after his son is murdered and his wife leaves him. As in many of her previous works, The Accidental Tourist focuses on the complexities of family relationships. The novel has also been made into a successful film starring William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. Most reviewers consider this to be her best work. Her tenth novel soon became a best seller and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. When The Accidental Tourist was published in 1985, Anne Tyler was already a well-established and successful author.
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