His quirky family takes center stage only briefly, which allows Michah to spend a great deal of this novel talking to himself in his spartan North Baltimore apartment (where he also works as its super) or chatting with just one other person. But Redhead, in its 192 pages, keeps Michah’s jogging feet firmly in the present. She thrives in big, creaky old houses bursting at the seams with people (even if only on special occasions) and provides detailed histories for her characters in lengthy, chapter-length flashbacks. Tyler tends to focus on the dynamics of large, middle-class American families– the relationships between parents and their children, the grudges between those children and their siblings, and the reverberations of generations past, despite a person’s best efforts to escape them. Redhead is no exception, despite its modest size and scope. Today, less than a year later, I’ve read all 22 of her novels, and felt the same peace each time I arrive at another ending. (A reliable source.) “I think you’ll like her,” he told me late last summer. I fell for Tyler and her soothing bibliography only recently, after she was recommended to me by a friend who happens to be this publication’s Chief Critic. That her endings have a consistency of tone is a hallmark of Tyler’s writing, and the reason Redhead By the Side of the Road–out April 7–is so well-timed. In this case, the recipient is Michah Mortimer, a “tall, bony man in his early forties” who owns a one-man tech support business. The latest novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Tyler, ends just as all her others have, which is to say it delivers upon its protagonist a moment of profound, much-deserved hope.

Redhead at the side of the road