Judging by the title, I assumed that Tyler’s protagonist would encounter a woman with red hair, perhaps stranded due to a flat tire, or waiting for a bus that never came. But there are always some little surprises to be found.

About halfway through, I say, ‘Oh, darn, it’s the same book over again.'” So she is at least self-aware. In an interview with the BBC, she confessed, “I always say when I’m starting a book, ‘This one’s gonna be different’. So now I’m thinking, ‘Oh dear, be careful what you wish for!’” Yet if it had actually burned down I would have felt so guilty. in support of Redhead the trip was canceled due to the coronavirus, and Tyler told the Guardian that she felt relieved, but also culpable: “I remember I used to pray the school would burn down before a math test the next day. I was shocked to learn that the reclusive writer had apparently planned to tour the U.K. Still, when you’re living through a global pandemic, maybe you don’t want anything too different or earth-shattering, and here comes Tyler-now 78 years old!-with another novel about Baltimore loners and misfits. However, even a Tyler fanatic like myself must begrudgingly admit that Redhead is not one of the superior entries in her canon it’s rather slight, and doesn’t really offer readers anything she hasn’t already done better in the past. As someone who lived in Baltimore for many years, I always pay special attention to the locations she mentions-legendary watering hole Swallow at the Hollow makes an appearance in Redhead, and Micah visits a client who lives in one of my old neighborhoods, Rodgers Forge. I have confessed before to being somewhat obsessed with Anne Tyler, and everything about her books fascinates me.

“He lives alone he keeps to himself his routine is etched in stone,” she writes in the very first paragraph. And Micah Mortimer, the protagonist of her latest book, Redhead by the Side of the Road, does not break the mold.

That character appears in almost every Anne Tyler novel occasionally it’s a woman, but the fussy gentleman, a creature of habit who seems to have stepped out of a much-earlier decade, is definitely a Tyler staple. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a middle-aged man, a resident of Baltimore, leads a strictly regimented and predictable existence, and then a stranger arrives and shakes it up.

Redhead by the side of the road