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A review by sidharthvardhan
Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler
3.0
The biggest disappointment was the fact that redhead of title didn't turn out to be a hot woman.
In fact, both the story and the characters are ordinary - not the the kind of characters that invoke passion, whether in form of love or hatred, from the readers. They are in fact the kind of people you will find in your real life. The protagonist Micah is a tall middle aged man with almost no emotional intelligence, someone whose biggest interests are about cleanliness and orderliness and and who is perfectly satisfied with his low income. Two events, both false alarms, make him question his lifestyle choices and he discovers that he has no dreams.
It is shortest book on 2020 booker list but it could have been shorter. A big part of book is Micah visiting his customers to attend their complaints. While his work occupies biggest chunk of his life, some of that could have been cut off. If it was shorter I would have given it 5 stars. In the end, what made the book work for me was gradual and very subtly built despair of Micah toward the end.
In fact, both the story and the characters are ordinary - not the the kind of characters that invoke passion, whether in form of love or hatred, from the readers. They are in fact the kind of people you will find in your real life. The protagonist Micah is a tall middle aged man with almost no emotional intelligence, someone whose biggest interests are about cleanliness and orderliness and and who is perfectly satisfied with his low income. Two events, both false alarms, make him question his lifestyle choices and he discovers that he has no dreams.
It is shortest book on 2020 booker list but it could have been shorter. A big part of book is Micah visiting his customers to attend their complaints. While his work occupies biggest chunk of his life, some of that could have been cut off. If it was shorter I would have given it 5 stars. In the end, what made the book work for me was gradual and very subtly built despair of Micah toward the end.