He has two jobs-one, managing a cubicle apartment building in return for free lodging in its dingy basement, the other, as the self-employed “Tech Hermit.” The latter involves solving people’s computer problems large and small. He has a defined set of tasks for every day of the week. “He lives alone he keeps to himself his routine is etched in stone.” He starts every morning with a run. Her brief novel, a novella really, looks at Micah through a lens of love. Micah Mortimer is the focus of Tyler’s literary pictures, a sharp focus that brings a simple, complicated man to life. Each snapshot of him tells its own unique story, while the whole collection of photos embraces both the fullness and the emptiness of his bachelor days. (Apr.Reading Anne Tyler’s novel, Redhead by the Side of the Road, is rather like paging through an album of family photographs, searching for pictures of a favorite, eccentric but lovable, middle-aged uncle. Agent: Jesseca Salky, Salky Literary Management. This quotidian tale of a late bloomer goes down easy. While Micah’s cool indifference occasionally feels like a symptom of Tyler’s spare, detached style, his moments of growth bring satisfaction. When Cassia dumps him for not immediately offering to let her move in, Micah descends into a funk that just might push him to prove himself worthy of her companionship.
After Micah tries to put Brink in touch with Lorna, he disappears. Micah knows it isn’t true, because he never slept with Brink’s mother, Lorna, an old girlfriend, but he tolerates the languid, starry-eyed kid who claims to look up to him for living a working-class life and who fixated on a photo of Micah kept by Lorna. Then college freshman Brink Adams shows up on his stoop and claims to be his son. The disruptions begin with a call from his schoolteacher girlfriend, Cassia Slade, who is in a panic because she is facing eviction. Micah Mortimer, 43, makes house calls for his Tech Hermit business and moonlights as the superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, where the residents observe his regimented routine and wonder, through Tyler’s gossip-inflected narration, “Does he ever stop to consider his life?” A fastidious everyman weathers a spate of relationship stresses in this compassionate, perceptive novel from Tyler ( Clock Dance).
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