The Accidental Tourist

Literary fiction

First published: 1985
Print length: 342 pagesBerkley Books, 1986

Description

Baltimore travel writer Macon Leary specializes in guides for people who want foreign places to feel as much like home as possible. His preference for routine becomes a defense after his young son is killed, leaving Macon and his wife isolated inside separate forms of grief. When an accident sends him back to the peculiar, carefully ordered household of his siblings, he meets Muriel, an outspoken dog trainer whose persistence unsettles his passivity. Drawn into her life and her sickly son’s needs, Macon begins testing possibilities he would ordinarily avoid, even as his marriage continues to exert its claim. Quietly comic and emotionally restrained, the novel examines mourning, habit, family loyalty, and the frightening uncertainty of choosing a future.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Descriptive · Direct · Witty

Pace

Measured

Tone

Humorous · Melancholic · Reflective · Warm

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Relationships

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

FamilyGriefIsolationLoveMarriageTransformation

About Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and critic whose career includes twenty-five novels. Her fiction is rooted in close observation of family life, often in Baltimore, and in the private habits through which people manage disappointment, grief, and attachment. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant shows siblings carrying incompatible versions of the same childhood, while Breathing Lessons finds comedy and strain within a long marriage. In The Accidental Tourist, routine becomes both refuge and constraint. Tyler’s characteristic mode combines direct, descriptive prose with conversational dialogue and understated wit. She is especially attentive to the way affection and irritation coexist, and to how households preserve old roles even as their members try to change. Her working methods join imaginative absorption with careful planning: she has described concentrating on characters through a form of daydreaming, while also drawing house plans and charting their histories. This balance of looseness and precision gives her domestic worlds their quiet density.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Berkley Books
Language: English
ISBN: 9780425114230

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