As Tyler opines in the openingĭoes he ever stop to consider his life? The meaning of it, the point? Does it trouble him to think that he will probably spend his next thirty or forty years this way? Nobody knows. But is the absence of unhappiness the same as the presence of happiness?īut it is a life that would be easily dismissed as mediocre and meaningless.

It is a life that does not appear to be unhappy at all: his home is secure his business adequate, even if his advice to clients seems limited to the familiar “Have you turned it off and on again” he takes very seriously the care of the residents in his apartment, and genuinely if quietly seems to empathise with them, even if their routines do not reach his standards. They had it down to a system, you could say.

More or less solidified: compromises arrived at, incompatibilities adjusted to, minor quirks overlooked. And he has a woman friend, a romantic partner, but “he refused to call anyone in her late thirties a “girlfriend”.” It is a tidy, neat contained life as Mycah works as a self employed computer technician and caretaker for the apartment block in which he lives where he grumbles and moans about the failure of other residents to abide by the bin days. Mycah allocates his chores to specific days and the routine never varies. “Notice how he uses his turn signal even when no one’s behind him,” they would say. He imagines an omniscient surveillance system on the road continually monitoring his driving, which he dubs Traffic God and imagines its passing judgement on him: He talks to himself in a faux French accent as he cooks, and adopts a German or possibly Russian one when he does “Zee moppink of zee floors”. He lives alone he keeps to himself his routine is etched in stone.Īnd he has some frankly ludicrous quirks. YOU HAVE TO WONDER what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer. The novel focuses on Mycah Mortimer and it would be very easy to write him off as an intensely boring man and someone unworthy of being the protagonist of a novel: I’d not read anything by Anne Tyler before, although I was aware that A Spool of Blue Thread had been longlisted for the Booker Prize, just as this one was. Abruptly, he signals for a turn, and when the light changes he heads east instead of continuing north.”Īfter reading a number of heavily plot driven books this year, Redhead was a definite change of pace for me. “The only place I went wrong, he writes, was expecting things to be perfect.

The redhead on the side of the road