[.ca] Accidental Tourist (ISBN 0140083405)

The Courage of Living:
Anne Tyler's strongest novel. Macon Leary, an emotionally battered man, has always been insular, introverted, and a loner. But even his shell of a normal existence is destroyed when his son is murdered and his distant wife asks for a divorce. His blood family only draws him farther away from the outside world of human social interaction. Then, arriving to train the dog he does not want, a woman with an extremely painful past of her own comes to draw Macon out of himself, and teaches him that living takes courage. One of the late twentieth-century's best reads.

Listen to the George Guidall Version:
I just finished listening to the unabridged Recorded Books version of this book for the second time. It is narrated by George Guidall, who is one of the best narrators out there. If you are going to listen to this book on tape, I highly recommend this version. See if your library has it, or go to recordedbooks.com and rent it--it will be well worth it. He also narrates another Anne Tyler book, Saint Maybe, and does just as fabulous a job on that one. Anne Tyler is one of my favorite authors, and George Guidall is one of my favorite narrators--the two together are amazing!

How to Explain?:
I have never read anything which so effectively spoke to me (at the same time) of the beauty and loneliness of life. Somewhere on this earth right now, lives a person (Anne Tyler) who possesses an amazing ability to see/sense/perceive an extraordinary range of the human experience. A million people could look at the same thing and not really know what it means. But Anne Tyler might understand. Such breadth of awareness.

Anne Tyler: Mistress of Quirk:
I've read all her books, and this is one of my favorites. It begins with Macon and his wife separating after tragedy drives them apart. Macon moves 'back home' with his 3 hopelessly out-of-touch-with-reality siblings, the oddest of which is his spinster sister, Rose. Enter: Muriel, an eccentric dog trainer, who gets right to work training Macon for re-entry into life. Every nuance is in place in this quirky book full of odd characters who have trouble finding their niche till Tyler discovers them and sets them again on their crooked path.

All the Lonely People:
There's a great passage about halfway through this novel. Macon, the protagonist, is flying and he looks out the window to see the roofs of houses. All of a sudden "It came to him very suddenly that every little roof concealed actual lives. Well, of course he'd known that, but all at once it took his breath away. He saw how real those lives were to the people who lived them-how intense and private and absorbing." That passage almost sums up the writing of Anne Tyler. She is fascinated by the "small" lives of normal people. Here, Tyler examines Macon. He and his wife's son was murdered senselessly about and year before, and the loss has torn apart their lives. When Macon's wife Sarah leaves him, he scrambles to put some order into his life. He stumbles into a relationship with the eccentric Muriel, a single mother from a totally different world as Macon. Eventually, his wife comes back into the picture. Macon is forced to totally examine these relationships and to squeeze insight out of them to determine where he should go with his life. Really, that is an extremely elementary summary of the book. The relationships and characterizations are so complex. The Accidental Tourist is a wonderfully written novel. The insights Tyler gives about the character are so apt. It is such a finely crafted novel. It is so fun to see how a paragraph about a cat at the beginning of the novel or how the marriage between to minor characters (Julian and Rose) can totally enlighten the situation between Macon and Sarah/Muriel. This is a wonderful novel, and I can't wait to experience Anne Tyler's other works.