Innocent with an Explanation the Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler; Knopf; 355 pages; $16.95
By R.Z. Sheppard
The sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken, held monogamy to be comfortable, laudable and sanitary. This is the sort of no-frills domesticity that would appeal to Macon Leary, also from "Bawl-mer" and the main attraction of Anne Tyler's tenth novel. After his wife leaves him, Leary reduces homemaking to an antic science. A percolator and an electric corn popper hooked up to a clock radio allow him to wake up to brewed coffee and popped corn. Bed making is eliminated by stitching a sleeping bag from a sheet. To save time and kilowatts, the laundry is thrown into the bathtub and stomped clean under the shower.
Readers of Anne Tyler novels have come to expect eccentric homebodies (Morgan Gower of Morgan's Passing, Ezra Tull of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant), but none combined oddities as well as Macon Leary. His occupation, for example, is matchless. Would you believe a travel writer for people who hate to travel? His guidebooks, published under the general heading "The Accidental Tourist," answer such questions as "What restaurants in Tokyo offered Sweet'n'Low? Did Amsterdam have a McDonald's? Did Mexico City have a Taco Bell? Did any place in Rome serve Chef Boyardee ravioli?" Like his unadventurous readers, Macon always feels the urge to shorten his itinerary and return home.
Such gentle humor is set against a backdrop of tragedy. The year before Macon and Wife Sarah separate, their twelve-year-old son Ethan is among bystanders systematically shot and killed by hold-up men at a fast-food outlet. Baldly stated, the irony seems a tasteless contrivance: Son of Junk-Food Expert Slain ) at Burger Bonanza. But like Evelyn Waugh in A Handful of Dust and John Irving in The World According to Garp, Tyler uses the senseless loss of a child to refine feelings out of a parent's worst fears.
The unusual result is a comedy of mourning, an affirmation of attachments to the dead. Ethan visits his father in dreams; Leary's closest companion is Edward, his son's Welsh corgi. Unruly and nippy, the dog requires the services of Muriel, an obedience trainer at Meow-Bow kennel. She is an untypical breed in "truncated black suede boots with witchy toes and needle heels," a streetwise stray looking for a home. The Maryland working girl eventually gets a leash around Macon, who wants his wife back but breaks a leg and has to move in with his brothers and sister. The Learys are a close family of bottle-cap manufacturers who play a private card game called Vaccination and can boast of an inventor grandfather who had high hopes for a motorcycle that could pull a plow and a hybrid flower that closed in the presence of tears. "Florists will be mobbing me," said the old man. "Think of the dramatic effect at funerals!" Sister Rose is so organized that she alphabetizes her kitchen so that the allspice would be stored next to the ant poison.
Macon is the most engaging member of this sweetly perverse clan. He may be master of the minimal, but he is inept in the face of vitality. Edward keeps him hopping. His boss insists on launching him in search of the latest in bland and drab. An admirably persistent Muriel steers him into her life, which includes a sickly son. Despite incompatible styles, the arrangement works: Muriel tames the dog, and Macon invigorates the boy.
More often, as Tyler adroitly stages events, Macon finds himself in a screwball farce. His leg fracture occurs when his cat gets stuck in a clothes dryer; his excited dog jumps on him, and he falls down the basement stairs while going to the rescue. A waitress insists that he check his crutches. Leaving the restaurant, he feels unexplainably crippled, "nearly doubled, his chin sunk low on his chest and his elbows jutting out awkwardly like the wings of a baby bird." It seems appropriate that he should look the way he feels, until an old woman points out that he has been given her much smaller crutches by mistake. Elsewhere, life imitates sitcoms. The Accidental Tourist reluctantly takes a business trip to Paris. Muriel, uninvited, tags along; a tense Macon wrenches his back. When Sarah unexpectedly shows up to nurse him, he is forced to utter the book's bottom line: "This is not the way it looks."
Pleading innocent with an explanation is the comic lot of many Anne Tyler characters. The predicament is obviously shared by her readers, whose number has been growing steadily for 20 years. The reasons are not hard to fathom. The author's style has evolved from women's magazine fiction of the '50s and early '60s. Then the accent was on conventions and the theme of togetherness. But Tyler loosened the bonds to accommodate more expressive decades. Young lovers became old marrieds who became newly single. Squares turned into oddballs as her perceptions deepened and her imagination grew frisky.
The Accidental Tourist brings Tyler up to date: girl leaves boy, boy keeps house. Macon Leary's unassertiveness is in timely contrast to Sarah's decisiveness and Muriel's zeal. Ethan's violent death is right off the 6 o'clock news. Even Macon finally proves conspicuously contemporary by taking charge of his life. The move seems a bit too abrupt for a character whose susceptibility to drift has been so carefully established. But this is a minor disappointment in a novel animated by witty invention and lively personalities, including Edward the feisty corgi, whose bite is just as bad as his bark.