An engaging story of an ordinary man and his relationships with family, friends and neighbors. I was surprised how this simple story of every day life kept my interest.

Micah Mortimer is a 40-something computer tech and apartment maintenance guy who has created a comfortable world for himself. He is committed to his daily routines. But, his girlfriend is facing eviction and Micah does not offer her a place to stay, while at the same time a Young boy, the son of a former girlfriend, shows up at his door and Micah takes him in. This leads to questioning a out the direction Micah has chosen for his life.
Tyler is a beautiful writer and can take the ordinary and make it extraordinary.

Redhead by the Side if the Road is a great book. Anne Tyler made Micah's life so real and believable. Hard to put it down once started.

If you read many Anne Tyler books you may say, "I have already met Micah Mortimer," and in a way you have, remember Macon Leary in The Accidental Tourist?
In Redhead by the Side of the Road you witness Micah grow as a person through the unexpected challenges that disrupt his otherwise orderly life.
I absolutely love this amusingly thoughtful book!
Thank you NetGalley, Knopf and Anne Tyler for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I have heard this may be Ms Tyler’s last novel - I sure hope not. A wonderful, albeit short read, about the most unloveable, but somehow loveable, character. I always appreciate novels about curmudgeons and this one did not disappoint. Micah is very wet in his ways and thrives in a world of order and routine. Then his world opens up a bit more and he is forced to see a glimpse of how life could be if he was more open to others being in his life and letting go of some of that order.

It seems at best unhelpful and at worst cruel to give a one-sentence review, so I will write something more about Anne Tyler’s Redhead By the Side of the Road, which I received thanks to Knopf Doubleday and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I’m not a huge Anne Tyler fan, and remember enjoying a few of her books quite a bit (Accidental Tourist comes to mind), but the last couple I tried to get into just didn’t do it for me (Spool of Blue Thread – meh). I did think I’d get through this one, it being fewer than 200 pages…but I confess I didn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. And I have no excuses — I’m quarantined at home, FFS. But that’s reality.

The protagonist is a classic nerdy introvert, with two things to occupy him: he is a super in an apartment building in Baltimore and is also a self-employed tech expert. In some ways I did appreciate him, as I relate to the idea of finding other people somewhat out of reach for the most part, but I actually didn’t really care…so two stars and it’s unlikely I will recommend it to my book group friends.

Oh, and the one sentence review? “Yawn.”

Micah Mortimer lives in a basement apartment in which there is a place for everything and everything has a place. Different from the rambunctious messy lives of his large extended family, Micah's life is calm, orderly and extremely predictable. He begins each morning with a run, answers help desk tickets for his business that only employs himself and then tinkers around his apartment building where he serves as the super. In a matter of a few days, Micah's life is rattled when his girlfriend fears an eviction and begins dropping hints (which he does not get) about moving in with him and a young man shows up on his door step wondering if he is the result of a romance between Micah and a college girlfriend (he was not). As Micah's routines are interrupted he begins to realize that he has tried to create a life devoid of meaningful or purposeful relationships. At first he feels like
he is okay with that and satisfied on his own, but after the "not-son" makes peace with his parents and returns home and his girlfriend breaks up with him he realizes that his life is empty and invisible and he is, in fact, rather lonely.

Micah appealed to the introvert in me - I fully appreciate a quiet, routine-filled life, and must have time alone each day. As much as human interaction stresses me out at times, I, like Micah, have realized that human connection is important. Otherwise, why are we here?

This was a very short book, and I'm not sure how it will appeal to the masses, but it should be read by the introverts and social-isolationists because it reminds us that without human interaction, life is very dull indeed.

Micah Mortimer lives a quiet, uneventful, steady life. He likes order and patience, which is perhaps why he enjoys being his own boss and running his small, steady, one-person computer repair business. He has a 'partner,' Cassie Slade, (girl-friend seems too strange a term for him, at their age) - a fourth grade teacher who lives in her own apartment.

But life isn't as ordered as anyone might hope, and Micah's calm, ordered life is interrupted in multiple ways in a short span of time. First, his girl friend tells him that she may soon be evicted from the apartment she is sub-leasing when the actual renter discovers she has a cat.

At about the same time, a young man (Brink Bartell Adams) shows up at Micah's doorstep. He claims to be Micah's son from a relationship Micah had in college with Lorna Bartell. Brink's never been able to get an answer from his mother as to who his father is, but his little research suggests it is Micah - his mother's only boyfriend from college. Micah, does the math and is quite certain he is not the father, but allows Brink, who appears to have left his college suddenly and without notice, to stay at his apartment for awhile.

This action causes Cassie to end their relationship. She assumes that rather than invite her to move in with him when she's facing eviction, he brings in a border so that he won't have to extend the offer to her. And bringing in Brink puts Micah back in touch with his old flame, Lorna. And at about this same time, Micah meets a new client, a young woman who has suddenly inherited a small fortune (including a computer she can't access) and she appears interested in exploring it with him. Micah's ordered world is facing a crossroads and he must decide which road to take.

Anne Tyler takes her usual observational skills and storytelling prowess to deliver another warm family story ... though of course there's no 'family' here.

I was introduced to Tyler's writing while I was in college, by a forward-thinking professor who actually thought Modern Literature should include authors who were currently writing and publishing, and I've been reading her work ever since. She's comfortable and familiar, and yet ... I wasn't sure what direction this book was going to take. In fact, I was uncomfortable for the longest time, sure we were going down a specific path that seemed natural, but one I didn't really want to explore. But Tyler is able to surprise, even with this gentle read.

The book is charming, with several different looks at relationships, and family converging on one man who was comfortable where he was. Is change necessary? Avoidable? Or is it a natural progression of time?

This is a quick read, but don't think that quick equates with simple. There is a lot packed in here, and nobody does it better than Anne Tyler - packing a lot of story in a tight frame. This is not the sort of book that will have an immediate, 'a-ha' sort of impact. This is the sort of book that you will likely reflect on for quite some time after closing the covers. And frankly, I found these books much more rewarding.

Looking for a good book? <em>Redhead by the Side of the Road</em> by Anne Tyler is a charming reflection on family, relationships, and change in an ordered world.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Redhead by the Side of the Road is a delightful read, a classic Anne Tyler novel. As usual, it is set in Baltimore, and this particular narrative is about Micah Mortimer, a solitary man who runs his own one-man company fixing computers. He keeps to himself and is set in his ways. Other than his family and his girlfriend Cass, he runs into people only when he is called to fix their computers or when he is doing his other job as building superintendent. He likes this because socializing is not his thing.

Micah is a creature of habit. Every day is scheduled for a specific task and his apartment is always neat and tidy. Every morning at 7:15, he goes for a run and hence the book's title. Because Micah's eyesight is less than average, he often mistakes red fire hydrants for redheads at the side of the road. He has a nice girlfriend named Cass who is a school teacher and he has a large and loving family with whom he occasionally socializes.

Everything seems to run like clockwork in Micah's life until two mishaps occur. Cass is subletting her apartment and the apartment's primary renter wants it back. Cass has a cat and can't find another place to live right away. Instead of inviting Cass to live with him until she can find a place, Micah lets Cass deal with this problem on her own, acting complacent and uncaring. Eventually, this leads to her breaking up with him which appears to be the story of his life - women leaving him.

Then there is the unexpected knock on his door, a teenager who has run away from home looking for his biological father. For some reason, he thinks Micah may be the man he is looking for. This leads to a comedy of errors and Micah's involvement with the boy's family and his reuniting with his college girlfriend. The story is told in the sensitive and tender manner that separates Anne Tyler's writing from the scores of others who would tell this narrative with a heavy hand.

As Micah tries to navigate his life with these two upheavals, he gains insight and realizes that being so rigid in his daily self-expectations may not be the best choice for him. He needs to loosen up a bit, allow for error and accept himself in a kinder and more essential way. He is more than what he does, he is a man with emotions that distinguish him as a unique and special person.

Prior to reading this, I had only read Tyler’s Accidental Tourist. I always mean to check out more of her work, and I’m so glad I got to start with this one. Delightful and quirky!

Anne Tyler creates such vivid characters. My only quibble with this one is that the ending seemed abrupt.

*Thanks to Netgalley for providing an e-galley in exchange for an honest review.

Review
Redhead by the Side of the Road
by Anne Tyler
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A new Anne Tyler novel is always a welcome event, but if there was ever a time when we needed the life-affirming qualities of her work, it’s in the midst of a life-threatening global pandemic. In REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, a gentle story of missed connections and second chances, Tyler delivers a soothing dose of the antidote for some of our anxiety and enforced isolation. . . .

Maybe I really liked this book because I identified with Micah. I like a schedule in my life. I like to be helpful, but sometimes people, including good friends take my humor wrong. If I was a runner, and took my glasses off while running, I could easily confuse a fire hydrant with a woman. Micah is just an everyday sort of guy who takes care of problems as they arise calmly and politely. And he solved the problem of a broken love life in the end chapter so well. Bravo, Micah.

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler is a character-driven novel about Micah Mortimer, a real creature of habit, stuck-in-a-rut kind of a guy. He lives a small life in a Baltimore apartment where he works as the building superintendent and also employs himself as a tech guru, the Tech Hermit, which says a great deal about him.

Micah has a set pattern to his day, a firm pattern for the days of the week; for example, Monday was his day to mop floors in the kitchen and bathroom, and vacuuming day was Friday. He isn’t open to a change in his routine so he is easily frustrated by two unconnected events: his friend Cass seems to be pressuring him with her concern about being evicted from her apartment and a teen named Brink turns up announcing that he thinks Micah is his father.

At times funny, especially when the hermit is among his siblings for a family outing about which he has asked if he has to attend, at other times deeply compassionate as he comes to realize the problems other people have in their lives.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting April 14, 2020.

Anne Tyler has a unique way of describing everyday things such as the redhead by the side of the road (it’s NOT what you think). Her books, always witty and engaging, never disappoint.

I’d like to thank Knopf, Borzoi Books, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

Micah is 44 years old and is very set in his ways. He has a girlfriend but isn't great at relationships. When a young man shows up at his door claiming to be his son, Micah's life is turned upside down. It's what he needs to have his life back on track. "Sometimes you can think back on your life and almost believe it was laid out for you in advance, like this plain clear path you were destined to take even if it looked like nothing but brambles and stobs at the time."

Anne Tyler always has a knack for finding the humanity and spark in even the most mundane lives. Micah Mortimer lives a very ordered life and doesn't like to stray from his routine. When a couple of chance occurrences disrupt his life he finally gets some insight into how lonely he really is and that change might not be a bad thing. A quick and uplifting book for our times.

Tyler’s newest is a short novel with a big heart. Micah is a single man in his 40’s, committed to his daily rituals and comforts. With his own business, the Tech Hermit, he is also a super of a building in Baltimore. When his girlfriend breaks up with him, he doesn’t really understand what he did wrong. Micah’s quirkiness is endearing, and you,will be rooting for him. Recommended, with thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

Quintessential Anne Tyler. A perfect story, so appreciated during current unsettling times. It's almost as if Anne Tyler gently forces us to take a look inside our own families, our own lives, and revel in the sheer beauty that is everyday people, everyday us. Voices that get lost in the news obsessed, celebrity obsessed world we live in. She is and has always been my favorite author. I absolutely loved this book.

Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove.

----------------------------------------

“Sometimes,” she said musingly, “you can think back on your life and almost believe it was laid out for you in advance, like this plain clear path you were destined to take even if it looked like nothing but brambles and stobs at the time. You know?”

The Tech Hermit has a life. I guess you could call it that. Micah Mortimer, in his mid-forties, has a modest clientele, and almost makes a living from his house-call tech-support enterprise. In addition, he gets a free apartment in return for being the part-time superintendent in his Baltimore apartment building. He has a schedule he follows slavishly. Monday is floor-mopping day. Tuesday is trash day. Wednesday night he takes out the recycling bins, and dusts his apartment, strips the linens from the daybed and does his laundry. Fridays is vacuuming. He enjoys going out for a run every morning, before the streets become cluttered with people. (A preferred state. He even fantasizes about how great it would be if a neutron bomb left the landscape, but removed all those irritating humans.) He even has an undemanding girlfriend, Cass. Their get togethers are also scheduled. What is not scheduled is that she is suddenly facing eviction, and Micah is too cut off to think he should offer to let her stay with him. And then an eighteen-year-old boy shows up at his apartment, believing Micah to be his father. Definitely not on the schedule.

The Redhead by the Side of the Road is Micah’s story of being jarred out of a fear-based, inert, complacent existence, and realizing that his very structured existence has left him feeling empty, lonely, and wanting more. But there are reasons why he became the defended creature he is.

You would be the same way if you’d been reared in a household where the cat slept in the roasting pan.

Tyler’s look at family is always a delight, this one reminiscent of You Can’t Take It With You, or, likelier, many of her prior, award-winning novels. Maybe he was not the right person to be raised the only boy in the family, with several sisters, and a general aura of chaos.

Micah always thought that of course his sisters would choose to be waitresses. Restaurants had the same atmosphere of catastrophe that prevailed in their own homes, with pots clanking and glassware clashing and people shouting “Coming through!” and “Watch you head!” and “Help! I’m in the weeds!” A battlefield atmosphere, basically.

Not helpful was a bad experience he had in a startup business, the undertaking of which entailed him leaving college early. He has also suffered serial disappointments in his dealings with entities lacking chips. The relationships he got into with women always seemed to end with her leaving and him broken. It gets tough going out there again and agan, when it seems that every time you extend a hand, someone cuts it off. Keeping the blinders on is a way of staying safe. Also, a way of staying in place.

He hadn’t always thought marriage was messy. But each new girlfriend had been a kind of negative learning experience.

Micah’s blinders may keep him from getting that Cass wants him to invite her to move in, and keep him oblivious to the flirtations from the 50-something dating machine in apartment 1B, and the invitations from a Tech Nerd client that have nothing to do with technical support. Jogging sans glasses, he even has trouble seeing clearly things that he passes on his run, a defective I/O system that is definitely in need of repair.

I confess I relate to Micah a fair bit, not entirely, thankfully, but enough to matter. I have suffered from a considerable swath of the sort of blindness he experiences, not to say I am exactly all better now, but I was once much, much worse. A tech guy too, although never a super, I was much more comfortable with regularity and order. There was also a blind spot when it came to reading some social clues. When Micah provides tech support to a woman who is clearly flirting with him, it does not register at all. I remember, after my first marriage ended, small flirtations did not exactly register for me, either. A woman in a Pathmark held up two cantaloupes, chest-high, and asked for my help “picking out some melons.” Yes, really. Eye roll please. In a CVS with my daughters, a woman asked for help reaching something on a high shelf. Apparently there was more to the request than I perceived. My older daughter looked impressed, “Wow, that woman was sooo flirting with you. Way to go, Pop.” I had no idea. So, I relate to Micah for his social cluelessness. That obviously banged a gong for me, made me feel for the guy. As did his tech support outings. With the amount of humanity on display in Anne Tyler’s novels, you are always likely to find a place or two where you might be able to plug in as well.

Speaking of which, Micah has written a book, First, Plug It In, the title of which warms my old techie heart. But while Micah is very well attuned to the challenges faced by his clients, and even some of the people he encounters, he does not seem able to apply that talent to himself.

Micah’s tech outings, and his superintendent outings, for that matter, highlight things that are going on in his life. One client, for example, is hoping that Micah can fix his printer, but it is ancient and wants replacing entirely. As in a change is clearly needed here. In another he finds a solution to a client’s puzzle in poring through some old materials in her home. Maybe something else could use some re-examination?

The writing is exquisite, of course, with Tyler offering details that tell us much about her characters. One that made me laugh out loud was when Micah is irked that one of the tenants had, yet again, not flattened out their cardboard refuse, as required by the local sanitation agency, his internal gripe ending with “some people; they just didn’t have a clue.”

Sometimes plugging it in is not enough. Second, you also have to switch it on. The question in Redhead… is whether Micah will be able to manage both steps, allow himself to perceive his own painful feelings, then do something about it. He is an appealing character, and you will want to find out if he can manage the necessary repairs to his life. In an interview with Writers Digest, Tyler was asked about the endearing characters that populate her novels:

Sometimes I don’t manage to keep them endearing, and if that happens, I ditch them. It takes me two or three years to write a novel. I certainly don’t want to spend all that time living with someone unlikable.

One thing about that 24-36 month duration is that the author puts every one of those months to good use. This is a short book, coming in at a crisp 192 pages. Like many masters of her trade, Tyler is adept at honing her output down to only the necessary.

She has been living in and writing about Baltimore and families for over fifty years. Redhead by the Side of the Road is her twenty-third novel. She is best known for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, her ninth, which was a finalist for both a Pulitzer and a Pen/Faulkner award. Ten times was the charm apparently, as her next one, The Accidental Tourist, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Ambassador Book Award, and was a finalist again for the Pulitzer. Number eleven, Breathing Lessons, finally netted her the Pulitzer.

If you have read Tyler before, this one will fit like a USB plug into a USB socket. It is short, sweet, and moving. Fans of Matthew Quick will also find this book very appealing. This is one Redhead you will definitely want to pick up.


Review posted – April 3, 2020


Full review - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3255407570

If there ever was a time to read an Anne Tyler novel, especially this novel, it’s now. Take comfort in Anne’s warm prose, her ambling pace, and her ‘average-man’ type characters, who go about daily life as expectantly as the sun rises and sets.
Micah Mortimer is a single man, in his early forties, content with his organized, steady life. He lives in the basement apartment of the building where he’s the part-time super. As sole owner of his company, TECH HERMIT, Micah fields calls from computer users on his cell, then drives to their home or business to solve their problems. A best-selling author at his local bookstore, Micah wrote, “First, You Plug It In,” created for everyone who’s afraid of their computer. He makes a sustainable living for a man with his simple needs.
Micah is such a creature of habit, that he has a daily schedule that only varies for the area he cleans each day. He rises at a set time, runs a certain number of miles, showers, has breakfast, then cleans the location set for that day. He takes calls for his business, slaps the TECH HERMIT sign on his KIA, and is off to repair computers.
Surprisingly, Micah has a girlfriend of three years, Cass, an elementary school teacher, who he sees several times a week. They have their own routine as well, of course.
Micah’s world is turned upside down by two events. The first, is by Cass, who calls to tell him that she may be evicted from the apartment she sublets because the owner of the lease visited unannounced and discovered Cass’s pet cat. Cass is beside herself with worry, but Micah assures her she’ll be able to find another apartment easily that takes pets. This is not what Cass wants to hear after dating Micah for three years! She wants to hear him say, “Oh don’t worry sweetie, you can move in with me.” But naturally, Micah is clueless.
The second event, which actually took place a week before Cass’s, was the out-of-the-blue, visit by Brink Bartell Adams, the teenage son of Lorna Bartell, a former girlfriend of Micah’s from college. For some reason, Brink was hoping that Micah might be his birth father. Unknown to Brink, and how do you explain this to a sensitive, naïve kid; Micah and Lorna never had sex in college or anywhere, at any time.
Anyway, Brink has a secret involving school that he just doesn’t want to deal with and face his parents. Micah kind of helps. Micah eventually realizes too, that he misses Cass and really wants her back in his life.
I’ll leave you with one thought from this wonderful book, when Micah first met Cass. He was in her 4th grade classroom fixing a computer problem while she was dealing with a few kids who didn’t want to go back to the nursing home they went to last year and sing Christmas carols. Cass tried to explain that most of the elderly people there had no one left in their own lives anymore and look forward to the kids’ visit. “Remember, she said, “you’ll be singing to a roomful of broken hearts.”
Micah asked Cass for a date that day before he left her classroom, she said yes. It was her speech to the children that had won him. “A roomful of broken hearts!” He liked that phrase.
Remember that phrase when you get to the end, which I personally think is spectacular, it’s important.

Thank you NetGalley, and Knopf Publishing Group, and Anne Tyler