redhead by the side of the road by anne tyler

They had it down to a system, you could say. More or less solidified: compromises arrived at, incompatibilities adjusted to, minor quirks overlooked.

And he has a woman friend, a romantic partner, but “he refused to call anyone in her late thirties a “girlfriend”.” It is a tidy, neat contained life as Mycah works as a self employed computer technician and caretaker for the apartment block in which he lives where he grumbles and moans about the failure of other residents to abide by the bin days. Mycah allocates his chores to specific days and the routine never varies. “Notice how he uses his turn signal even when no one’s behind him,” they would say. He imagines an omniscient surveillance system on the road continually monitoring his driving, which he dubs Traffic God and imagines its passing judgement on him:

He talks to himself in a faux French accent as he cooks, and adopts a German or possibly Russian one when he does “Zee moppink of zee floors”. He lives alone he keeps to himself his routine is etched in stone.Īnd he has some frankly ludicrous quirks. YOU HAVE TO WONDER what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer. The novel focuses on Mycah Mortimer and it would be very easy to write him off as an intensely boring man and someone unworthy of being the protagonist of a novel: I’d not read anything by Anne Tyler before, although I was aware that A Spool of Blue Thread had been longlisted for the Booker Prize, just as this one was. Abruptly, he signals for a turn, and when the light changes he heads east instead of continuing north.”Īfter reading a number of heavily plot driven books this year, Redhead was a definite change of pace for me. “The only place I went wrong, he writes, was expecting things to be perfect.

Redhead by the side of the road by anne tyler