the accidental tourist anne tyler summary

So he calls Muriel, a dog trainer he met when boarding Edward at the Meow-Bow.

Macon’s siblings pressure him to get rid of the dog, but he can’t-it would be like losing the last part of Ethan. His behavior is becoming increasingly aggressive. Not long after his wife, Sarah, abandons him, he breaks his leg (in an accident precipitated by his deceased son’s dog, Edward), forcing him to move into the family home that his two brothers and his sister still occupy.Įdward is also not handling Ethan’s (the son’s) death well. The author of a series of city guidebooks for business travelers, Macon is especially suited for his job of finding options that would make reluctant jet-setters feel as though they weren’t far from home. In a few minutes, I was immersed in Macon’s world. So, I abandoned that idea and reread The Accidental Tourist, because I remembered that it started my obsession with her. It has a very slow opening that didn’t capture my attention. I don’t remember ever reading it, and starting it now, I just couldn’t get into it. I determined that the earliest Tyler book I own is The Clock Winder. Then I remembered how much I had once loved Anne Tyler, and decided I would read her books in sequence. Recently, I searched my house for fresh fiction, and it seemed I didn’t have a single unread novel, though nonfiction is stacked in To-Be-Read towers. Suddenly, Macon didn’t seem all that strange anymore, so I returned to the book.Īnd read another Tyler novel, and another, and another–maybe a dozen in all. But then I thought about some of the people I know, who have made their own adaptations to what I might consider “normal” routines. And so he could sleep in fresh sheets every night without the pesky task of making the bed, he sewed the sheets into envelopes that could just be placed atop the mattress.īy page 15, I was ready to give up reading. He also washed his clothes daily (with his feet) while taking his shower. He began optimizing his life by systematically rethinking and reorganizing his routines, like keeping a popcorn popper and an electric percolator connected to a timer on the bedroom windowsill, so he could awaken to the aromas of coffee and popcorn, his new standard breakfast menu. In fact, his behavior could only be described as bizarre. Macon Leary’s wife had left him after the death of their only son, and Macon wasn’t coping very well. One day while browsing in my neighborhood bookstore, I found a $2.50 pre-read paperback copy and decided to see what all the fuss was about. The movie The Accidental Tourist had come and gone, and I’d never seen it. I discovered the novelist Anne Tyler in the early 1990s.

The accidental tourist anne tyler summary