Review: Redhead by the Side of the Road
Gaby Meares
Oh, Anne Tyler, you’ve done it again! In only 178 pages you have crafted a deceivingly simple story about a seemingly simple man that reveals how even the simplest of souls is only looking for love and understanding.
Micah Mortimer in a man in his early forties whose life is all about order. He lives alone, he has his routines, he has a large extended chaotic family whom he likes a lot, but they make him crazy sometimes. He’s been in a relationship with Cass for over three years ‘and they had reached the stage where things had more or less solidified: compromises arrived at, incompatibilities adjusted to, minor quirks overlooked. They had it down to a system, you could say’. In Micah’s eyes, ‘his life was good. He had no reason to feel unhappy’.
Micah struggles to find the appropriate thing to say, so often he says nothing.
‘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.’
When the teenage son of an old college girl-friend turns up on his doorstep, and his relationship with Cass falters, Micah is dismayed to find his orderly life disrupted. But it’s these disruptions that ultimately pave the way for him to connect with his heart. As he tells Cass ‘I’m a roomful of broken hearts’. Exquisite!