What happens to a man like this when he loses the son who is the most joyful, most important, most beloved thing in his life? They are forever leaving home and getting lost on the way to the hardware store, and then spending hours trying to find their way back again. In one of several metaphors for their condition, none of the Leary children has a sense of direction. They all find life rather senseless and difficult, and they respond to it with stoicism and planning.

One of four children of a feckless, flighty mother, Macon and his siblings were raised to cope. Macon doesn’t know how to cope with this loss - how to behave in the wake of such a catastrophe - except to carry on as he always has. They had a child together, a twelve-year-old boy who was shot in a senseless act of random violence while he was away at summer camp. The novel begins just after Macon’s wife of twenty years has left him. A highly unlikely love becomes the anchor that helps him find purpose again. I think of it as a book about a man who’s adrift in his own life.

The story is told through the point of view of the protagonist, Macon Leary, who is rigid, dour, and relentlessly unhappy.Īnd yet something about this novel pulls me back again and again. The Accidental Tourist is not a sexy book, nor is it a particularly romantic one. At least this one didn’t have any wild sex in it. I was forever doing this - reading books that were too old for me and loving them for reasons that I cannot understand now and could not have articulated then. I must have read it for the first time in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when I was around ten years old. And it’s also funny, in a very off-beat way. This is a novel - a brilliant novel - about grieving and love and the quiet collapse of a life. There aren’t a lot of soft resting places or pleasant sentiments in it. And yet I can understand why people would give the book only one star. The Accidental Tourist is one of my all-time favorite novels, and while it’s not a romance novel - I’d call it literary fiction with romantic elements - it’s definitely high on my list of formative wonk. So begins one of a number of one-star reviews for Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist on Goodreads, where the novel has nearly 25,000 ratings. “I found no humor, only desperation and pathos.”

The accidental tourist goodreads