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Well, yes: but ‘people’ aren’t supposed to include your girlfriend and your family.
Redhead by the Side of the Road — its title a reference to the tendency of Micah’s ageing eyes to mistake inanimate objects for human beings when he’s out running — is a noticeably compact novel, studded with miniature portraits of other lives. Each of them bears Tyler’s characteristic empathy and brilliance at capturing something essential in only a few brush strokes: the vampish middle-aged neighbour who gamely carries on dating, flashing her teeth at Micah not in flirtation but to solicit his advice on whether he thinks they’ll impress a dentist she’s dining with that evening; his customers, flocking to the ‘tech hermit’ because they don’t know how to turn their modems on and off; and Cass, the girlfriend, whose adoption of a stray cat appears to Micah a piece of dangerously impulsive sentimentality.
But one would have liked more from such vignettes — especially when the runaway son of Micah’s old college girlfriend turns up, in the mistaken belief that Micah might be his father. This of course is the kind of plot twist that starts unlikely-buddy and stand-in parent-figure films, and there’s a kind of austerity to the way Tyler resists the temptation, sticking to the novel’s logic: if you’re writing about a character who consistently cuts off opportunities and stalls his life, then having him undergo sudden, action-filled transformation is cheating.
Tyler doesn’t cheat, and the result is that her writing here can feel truthful and moving but also slightly underpowered. Still, her novels are always absorbing, and her emotional generosity — the way she reveals in tiny flashes the extent to which we really know what we’re attempting to hide from ourselves — is never less than impressive. And at the present time, a book that weighs our ability to insulate and isolate ourselves against disaster alongside the endurance of small kindnesses is not a bad one to have to hand.
Because you read about baltimore
Also by Alex Clark
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