‘Redhead by the Side of the Road’ by Anne Tyler

Before anything else I must speak of awards. I’m so excited because my favourite book award, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, announced its 2020 winner last night and it was the only book from the shortlist that I had read and I loved it: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. For my recent review of this beautiful book, click here. It was up against some heavyweights like Hilary Mantel’s third instalment in her Thomas Cromwell series (the first two in the series were Booker winners and the third is on the long-list this year too, sheesh!)

Now when we look at the Booker Prize 2020 long-list (shortlist to be chosen next week) we see Hilary Mantel’s brick of a historical novel, but we also see beside it this quirky slim new novel by Anne Tyler. She is one of my favourite authors but I never expected to see her among the award selections until A Spool of Blue Thread made it onto the Booker long-list in 2015, and now Redhead by the Side of the Road in 2020. Tyler is one of my favourite authors and I appreciate her unpretentious style, but are her novels award material? She did win the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for Breathing Lessons and to be honest, I am always complaining that award winners are so literary focused that they become unreadable. So yes! Tyler deserves a seat at the table and I will cheer her on for writing approachable novels that have depth and capture humanity. She has a way of making the ordinary come alive…sort of subtle extraordinary, really.

I did love this book, it felt like an undemanding comfort read during this challenging season on the planet. The dialogue is fresh and the main character’s simple lifestyle well described. It’s also surprisingly short (less than 200 pages) and almost reads like a novella. Here is the premise, and even though it may seem at first glance to be like The Rosie Project, it is very different–more profound and realistic.

“Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life. But one day his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late thirties a “girlfriend”) tells him she’s facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah’s door claiming to be his son. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah’s meticulously organised life off-kilter, risk changing him forever. An intimate look into the heart and mind of a man who finds those around him just out of reach, and a funny, joyful, deeply compassionate story about seeing the world through new eyes.”