Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

       Published in 2020, 178 pages paperback.  I  found this gem at a local book sale and read it in August.  Here end of year with a stack of books I've read and not blogged.  I am trying to get busy before year end.  This was a delightful book, packed with details about ordinary type characters who might not be given a second thought.  It is touching and  a good story as Anne Tyler usually writes. The back cover summarizes this well, so I include that here.  A review from Oprah magazine said, "..realism has been so pervasive a style that it is easy to forget it is a style.  One of its flawless practitioners is Anne Tyler.."  The book has touches of humor along with the heart stirring  feelings it creates for the reader.  

The book begins, "You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer.  He lives alone; he keeps to himself; his routine is etched in stone. At 7:15 every morning you see him out on his run.  Along about 10 or 10:30 he slaps the magnetic TECH HERMIT sign onto the roof of his Kia.  The times he leaves on his calls will vary but not a day seems to go by without several clients requiring his services."  It could lead a reader, unfamiliar with Anne Tyler to think this might be a boring book.  But her gift is in the ordinary.  

Page 26 reveals how the book got it's title. " When Micah went on his runs he never wore his glasses.  He hated to feel them bobbing up and down on his nose, which was why.  He hated how they grew steamy when he sweated.  This was unfortunate, because in the past few years his distance vision had noticeably worsened.  Not that he was going blind or anything it was just that her was getting old, as his optometrist so tactlessly put it.  At night the lane markers on the streets were all but invisible and just last week he had whacked a black spider that turned out to be a tangle of sewing thread.  On the homeward stretch this morning, he made his usual mistake of imagining for a second that a certain fire hydrant, faded to the pinkish color of an aged clay flowerpot, was a child or a very short grown up...."  Perhaps because I too have needed glasses and identify with the symptoms I found this amusing.  But this is just one example of the author's ability to detail the ordinary and evoke identification, humor, an oh yes from the reader.  

A boy, a young man, Brink Adams shows up at his stoop and pursues his introduction.  He is the son of a college friend, Lorna Bartell, now a lawyer but not someone with whom Micah has kept any contact.  Brink needs a place to stay, which surprises Micah who  takes him in.    

Some people get into trouble by talking too much, not so with Micah, his words are few and sometimes his silence in under appreciate nor is his humor.  Cass his kind of "girlfriend" is leaving his apartment and he tries to humor her,  Pg 49, "Aw now, he said teasing her.  "Why do that when you've got a car of your own you can live in?    But this didn't make her smile.  She just closed the door behind her and left him standing alone in the kitchen.....He ought to fetch Brink some sheets he supposed.  Then he would relocate to his bedroom. Ordinarily he hung out on his couch and played solitaire on his phone in the evenings but not tonight.  Not with an audience, so to speak.  That was the trouble with houseguests, they took over a person's space.  They seeped into all the corners."  

All's well that ends well    Page 148,   A 5 ***** read