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’The Accidental Tourist’

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Reviewed by Larry McMurty

• Sept. 8, 1985

IN Anne Tyler's fiction, family is destiny, and (nowadays, at least) destiny clamps down on one in Baltimore. For an archeologist of manners with Miss Tyler's skills, the city is a veritable Troy, and she has been patiently excavating since the early 1970's, when she skipped off the lawn of Southern fiction and first sank her spade in the soil which has nourished such varied talents as Poe, Mencken, Billie Holiday and John Waters, the director of the films ''Pink Flamingos'' and ''Polyester.''

It is without question some of the fustiest soil in America; in the more settled classes, social styles developed in the 19th century withstand, with sporelike tenacity, all that the present century can throw at them. Indeed, in Baltimore all classes appear to be settled, if not cemented, in grooves of neighborhood and habit so deep as to render them impervious - as a bright child puts it in ''The Accidental Tourist'' - to everything except nuclear flash.

From this rich dust of custom, Miss Tyler is steadily raising a body of fiction of major dimensions. One of the persistent concerns of this work is the ambiguity of family happiness and unhappiness. Since coming to Baltimore, Miss Tyler has probed this ambiguity in seven novels of increasing depth and power, working numerous changes on a consistent set of themes.

In ''The Accidental Tourist'' these themes, some of which she has been sifting for more than 20 years, cohere with high definition in the muted (or, as his wife says, ''muffled'') personality of Macon Leary, a Baltimore man in his early 40's who writes travel guides for businessmen who, like himself, hate to travel.

The logo on the cover of these travel guides (''The Acciental Tourist in England,'' ''The Accidental Tourist in New York,'' etc.) is a winged armchair; their assumption is that all travel is involntary, and they attempt to spare these involuntary travelers the shock of the unfamiliar, insofar as that's possible. Macon will tell you where to find Kentucky Fried Chicken in Stockholm, or whether there's a restaurant that serves Chef Boy-Ar-Dee ravioli in Rome. Macon himself is so devoted to his part of Baltimore that even the unfamiliar neighborhoods he visits affect him as negatively as foreign countries.

Like most of Miss Tyler's males, Macon Leary presents a broad target to all of the women (and even a few of the men) with whom he is involved. His mother; his sister, Rose; his wife, Sarah, and, in due course, his girlfriend, Muriel Pritchett - a dog trainer of singular appearance and ability - regularly pepper him on the subject of his shortcomings, the greatest of which is a lack of passion, playfulness, spontaneity or the desire to do one single thing that they like too do. This lack is the more maddening because Macon is reasonably competent; if prompted he will do more or less anything that's required of him. What exasperates the women is the necessity for constant prompting.

WHEN attacked, Macon rarely defends himself with much vigor, which only heightens the exasperation. He likes a quiet life, based on method and system. His systems are intricate routines of his own devising, aimed at reducing the likelihood that anything unfamiliar will occur. The unfamiliar is never welcome in Macon's life, and he believes that if left to himself he can block it out or at least neutralize it.

Not long after we meet him, Macon is left to himself. Sarah, his wife of 20 years, leaves him. Macon and Sarah have had a tragedy: their 12-year-old son, Ethan, was murdered in a fast-food joint, his death an accidental byproduct of a holdup.

Though Macon is as grieved by this loss as Sarah, he is, as she points out, ''not a comfort.'' When she remarks that since Ethan's death she sometimes wonders if there's any point to life, Macon replies, honestly but unhelpfully, that it never seemed to him there was all that much point to begin with. As if this were not enough, he can never stop himself from correcting improper word choice, even if the incorrect usage occurs in a conversation about the death of a child. These corrections are not made unkindly, but they are invariably made; one does not blame Sarah for taking off.

With the ballast of his marriage removed, Macon immediately tips into serious eccentricity. His little systems multiply, and his remaining companions, a Welsh corgi named Edward and a cat named Helen, fail to adapt to them. Eventually the systems overwhelm Macon himself, causing him to break a leg. Not long after, he finds himself where almost all of Miss Tyler's characters end up sooner or later - back in the grandparental seat. There he is tended to by his sister. His brothers, Porter and Charles, both divorced, are also there, repeating, like Macon, a motion that seems all but inevitable in Anne Tyler's fiction -a return to the sibling unit.

This motion, or tendency, cannot be blamed on Baltimore. In the very first chapter of Miss Tyler's first novel, ''If Morning Ever Comes'' (1964), a young man named Ben Joe Hawkes leaves Columbia University and hurries home to North Carolina mainly because he can't stand not to know what his sisters are up to. From then on, in book after book, siblings are drawn inexorably back home, as if their parents or (more often) grandparents had planted tiny magnets in them which can be activated once they have seen what the extrafmilial world is like. The lovers and mates in her books, by exerting their utmost strength, can sometimes delay these regroupings for as long as 20 years, but sooner or later a need to be with people who are really familiar - their brothers and sisters - overwhelms them.

Macon's employer, a man named Julian, who manages to marry but not to hold Macon's sister, puts it succinctly once Rose has drifted back to her brothers: ''She'd worn herself a groove or something in that house of hers, and she couldn't help swerving back into it.'' Almost no one in Miss Tyler's books avoids that swerve; the best they can hope for is to make a second escape, as does the resourceful Caleb Peck in ''Searching For Caleb'' (1976). Brought back after an escape lasting 60 years, Caleb sneaks away again in his 90's.

Macon, less adventurous than Celab Peck, is saved from this immolation-by-siblings through the unlikely agency of Edward, the Welsh corgi. Unnerved byy the dissolution of his own secure routine, Edward begins to crack up. He starts attacking people, including Julian and Macon's brothers too, one of whom, in a brilliant scene, Edward trees in the family pantry at the very moment that Macon is experiencing an anxiety attack in a restaurant on top of a building in New York.

Re-enter Muriel Pritchett, the dog trainer Macon had met earlier when forced to work out emergency boarding arrangements for Edward. Muriel is everything the Learys are not: talkative, confrontational, an eccentric dresser, casual about word choice. She lives with her sickly child, Alexander, in a Baltimore neighborhood that is not much less foreign to Macon than, say, Quebec. Muriel is also very different from Sarah.

Nonetheless, to the horror of his family, Macon moves in with Muriel. His indifference to his former life is os great that he doesn't even get upset when the pipes in his own house burst, ruining his living room. Muriel, despite her apparent unsuitability, ''could raise her chin sometimes and pierce his mind like a blade. Certain images of her at certain random, insignificant oments would flash before him: Muriel at her kitchen table, ankles twined around her chair rungs, filling out a contest form for an all-expense-paid tour of Hollywood. Muriel telling her mirror, 'I look like the wrath of God' - a kind of ritual of leavetaking. Muriel doing the dishes in her big pink rubber gloves with the crimson fingernails, raising a soapy plate and trailing it airily over to the rinse water.''

Macon, a fairly keen self-analyst, recognizes that while he does not exactly love Muriel, he ''loved the surprise of her, and also the surprise of himself when he was with her. In the foreign country that was Singleton Street he was an entirely different person.''

Surprise, however, is not quite enough; not to ne so wedded to the familiar as Macon. Sarah, the not-yet-divorced wife, though a singularly articulate critic of Learys in general and Macon in particular, finds that all her criticisms do not entirely invalidate Macon as a mate. She wants him back, Muriel wants to keep him, and a fierce tussle ensues, one in which Macon takes a largely spectatorial interest. He cannot entirely resist the suitable Sarah, nor forget the unsuitable but vivid Muriel.

The final scenes of this drama take place in Paris, where the two women manage to corner him. Even as Macon is aking his decision, he is reassured by a sense that in a way it is only temporary, life being, in his scheme of things, a stage from which none of the major players ever completely disappear.

''The Accidental Tourist'' is one of Anne Tyler's best books, as good as 'Morgan's Passing,'' ''Searching for Caleb,'' ''Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.'' The various domestic worlds we enter - Macon/Sarah; Macon/ the Leary siblings; Macon/Muriel - are delineated with easy skill; now they are poignant, now funny. Miss Tyler shows, with a fine clarity, the mingling of misery and contentment int eh daily lives of her families, remind us how alike - and yet distinct - happy and unhappy families can be. Muriel Pritchett is as appealing a woman as Miss Tyler has created; and upon the quiet Macon she lavishes the kind of intelligent consideration that he only intermittently gets from his own womenfolk.

TWO aspects of the novel do not entirely satisfy. One is the unaccountable neglect of Edward, the corgi, in the last third of the book. Edward is one of the more fully characterized dogs in recent literature; his breakdown is at least as interesting and if anything more delicately handled than Macon's. Yet Edward is allowed to slide out of the picture. Millions of readers who have managed to saddle themselves with neurotic quadrupeds will want to know about Edward's situation.

The other questionable element is the dead son, Ethan. Despite an effort now and then to bring him into the book in a vignette or a nightmare, Ethan remains mostly a premise, and one not advanced very confidently by the author. She is brilliant at showing how the living press upon one another, but less convincing when she attempts to add the weight of the dead. The reader is invited to feel that it is this tragedy that separates Macon and Sarah. But a little more familiarity with Macon and Sarah, as well as with the marriages in Miss Tyler's other books, leaves one wondering. Macon's methodical approach to life might have driven Sarah off anyway. He would have corrected her word choice once too often, one feels. Miss Tyler is more successful at showing through textures how domestic life is sustained than she is at showing how these textures are ruptured by a death.

At the level metaphor, however, whe has never been stronger. The concept of an accidental tourist captures in a phrase something she has been saying all along, if not about life, at least about men: they are frequently accidental tourists in their own lives. Macon Leary sums up a long line o fher males, Jake Simmes in ''Earthly Possessions'' is an accidental kidnapper. The lovable Morgan Gower of ''Morgan's Passing,'' an accidental obstetrician in the first scenes, is an accidental husband or lover in the rest of the book. Her men slump arond like tired tourists - friendly, likable, but not all that engaged. Their characters, like their professions, seem accidental even though they come equipped with genealogies of Balzacian thoroughness. All of them have to be propelled through life by (at the very least) a brace of sharp, purposeful women - it usually takes not only a wife and a girlfriend but an indignant mother and one or more devoted sisters to keep these sluggish fellows moving. They poke around haphazardly, ever mild and perennially puzzled, in the foreign country called Life. If they see anything worth seeing, it is usually because a determined woman on the order of Muriel Pritchett thrusts it under their noses and demands that they pay some attention. The fates of these families hinge on long struggles between semiattentive males and semiobsessed females. In her patient investigation of such struggles, Miss Tyler has produced a very satisfying body of fiction.

Larry McMurty's most recent novel is ''Lonesome Dove.''

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Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist – The Meaning in a Nutshell

Dr Mark’s The Meaning in a Nutshell

Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist (1985)

Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist (1985) is a novel about ordinary people who appear to be increasingly extraordinary as one learns more about their characters and their lives. 

The story centres on Macon Leary’s journey of personal development.  It begins by presenting him as being excessively introverted, too meticulously organised, and pessimistic.  It concludes with him becoming more open to interacting meaningfully with the places and people he encounters, which enhances the quality of his life. 

Parallel to this, Macon’s journey also involves him overcoming his depression that resulted from his grief over the loss of his son and subsequent broken marriage, a psychological condition that enhanced his already introverted nature and associated excessive behaviours.  The novel involved him finding a new relationship with a bright, mercurial, optimistic woman, Muriel, whose presence helped him to become able to love again. 

Anne Tyler seems to see the world in terms of dichotomies and compromises.  She seems to see all relationships as somewhat imperfect, but she believes that the most rewarding relationships are those where different people complement each other in ways that bring out the best in each individual.  Correspondingly, she implies that relationships that fail to do this should be reconsidered. 

Nevertheless, Anne Tyler seems to believe that all relationships involve compromises.  In each successful relationship depicted in the novel, each partner compromised to facilitate the formation of a viable and mutually satisfying bond. 

Student resources by Dr Mark Lopez

© Mark Lopez 2021 All RIGHTS RESERVED

The purpose of the concise notes of Dr Mark’s The Meaning in a Nutshell is to provide much needed help to students seeking to unlock the meaning of the texts with which they have to deal.  (More elaborate notes are provided in lessons as part of my private tutoring business.) 

Subject: The Accidental Tourist meaning, The Accidental Tourist themes, The Accidental Tourist analysis, The Accidental Tourist notes

The Accidental Tourist

56 pages • 1 hour read

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Summary and Study Guide

Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist is a literary fiction novel that follows the character-driven story of Macon Leary, who must navigate life following the death of his son and the dissolution of his marriage. The Accidental Tourist was originally published in 1985 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The Accidental Tourist is Anne Tyler’s 10th novel and one of her most recognized works. This study guide follows the paperback Berkley edition released in 1986.

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Macon Leary is a writer based out of Baltimore who creates travel guides for people who must travel on business but do not want to be bothered with discomfort or unexpected experiences. Macon is an expert at finding the most comfortable and convenient solutions to average problems. While driving back from a beach vacation, Macon’s wife, Sarah , informs him that she wants a divorce. It’s been a year since their son, Ethan, was unexpectedly killed, and the two have grieved in very different ways. After Sarah moves out, Macon restructures their house, creating a multitude of systems and contraptions to maximize comfort and convenience. When it comes time for Macon to go on his next trip for work, he goes to board the family dog, Edward . He learns Edward is blacklisted from the vet for biting a worker last time he was boarded. Desperate, Macon finds another vet, where he meets Muriel Pritchett. Muriel is talkative and great with dogs. She agrees to let Macon board Edward and proposes that she give Edward obedience lessons. Macon declines and goes on his trip. When he returns, he commits to more systems to run the house. As these systems break down, Macon has an accident, resulting in a broken leg.

Macon moves in with his siblings, Rose , Charles, and Porter, while his leg heals. The Leary siblings are as peculiar as Macon with their habits, rituals, and organizational tendencies. They don’t answer the phone, eat baked potatoes often, and play the same made-up card game they’ve played since they were children. Macon’s siblings complain about Edward’s behavior, but Macon struggles to do anything about it because Edward belonged to Ethan. Finally, after being bit on the hand, Macon reaches out to Muriel, who has persistently tried to get Macon to hire her ever since they met. Muriel is great with Edward and helps Macon teach Edward things like sitting, staying, and walking on a leash. Edward struggles to learn to lie down, so Macon calls the vet. The clerk informs Macon that Muriel is out that day because her son is sick. The next time Macon sees Muriel, he asks how her son is, and she loses her temper because he wasn’t supposed to know about her son yet. Macon fires Muriel in the same scene because she harshly punishes Edward. As Macon’s leg heals, he struggles to overcome his grief from Ethan’s death and his separation from Sarah. When Sarah invites Macon to dinner, he proposes they have another baby to resolve their marital issues, but Sarah instead tells Macon she wants a divorce and cites his seemingly callous reaction after Ethan’s death and lack of comfort to her as her reason.

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After Macon gets his cast off, he flies to New York for work. He visits a skyscraper restaurant, where he has a panic attack after realizing he’s distanced himself from everyone he’s ever cared about. He calls home to ask for help despite his siblings being states away and learns that Edward is misbehaving and has cornered Charles in the pantry. Macon has no one else to call to help Charles and take Edward, so he calls Muriel and asks for her help. Not only does Muriel agree to rescue Charles, but she also comforts Macon and talks him down from his panic. When Macon returns from New York, he allows Muriel to begin training Edward again, and the two begin to spend a lot more time together. Muriel tells Macon all about her life and her son, Alexander. She invites Macon to come to dinner at her house, but Macon is afraid to do so, thinking it will feel like he’s finding substitutes for Sarah and Ethan.

When Macon goes to deliver a letter to Muriel to explain why he won’t have dinner with her, she surprises him with her tenderness, and Macon opens up about his grief regarding Ethan and the way he’s distanced himself from everyone. Muriel invites Macon to sleep in her bed, and he allows her to lead him to her room and tuck him in. Macon begins to spend much more time with Muriel and Alexander, eating dinner with them, helping Alexander with his homework, and joining them at Muriel’s parents’ house for Christmas. Macon’s relationship with Muriel heals him and helps him become less distant from the people around him. He moves in with her and gets to know the people of her street better than he ever knew his own neighbors. He forms a special bond with Alexander, teaching him to fix household items and taking him shopping for clothes.

Eventually, Muriel’s tendencies begin to wear Macon down. He is bothered by her misuse of words, her persistence, her insecurities, and her chaos. Muriel tries to convince Macon to take her to France, but Macon tells her no. Muriel presents Macon a calendar for the current year to show him she’s picked out a wedding day for them. Macon tells her he’s not interested in marrying again because he thinks only perfect couples get married, which leads to an argument and more tension between the couple as time passes.

After encountering Sarah at a wedding, Macon finds Sarah reaching out to him more and more during a trip to Canada. Sarah calls him in every city, at first asking if she can move back into their house because her lease is ending, then just wanting to talk about the weather. She hints that she wants to get back together with Macon and tells him she wishes she were with him in Canada. When Macon lands back in Baltimore, he drives home to Sarah instead of driving to Muriel’s house. They rekindle their relationship, much to Muriel’s heartbreak. Macon and Sarah begin to put their lives back together, buying new furniture and reassembling the house after it was damaged in a snowstorm during Macon’s absence. When Sarah is not around, Macon finds himself longing to talk to someone. He calls Muriel to ask about Alexander’s allergy shots, and Muriel scolds him for having the audacity to contact her about Alexander after abandoning them.

When Macon leaves for France, Muriel shows up on his same flight, having booked the same hotel. Muriel insists that Macon needs her, and Macon feels Muriel will be extremely unprepared to travel in Paris. Macon does his best to avoid Muriel, and she gets along fine without him. He eventually agrees to have dinner with her at a Burger King in Paris, where Muriel fills Macon in about the people on her street. She asks him to come to bed with her, but Macon declines. After several days in Paris, Macon starts day trips to other cities. When he goes to invite Muriel to join him, he throws his back out and becomes incapacitated. He calls his publisher to inform him of the delay, and word gets back to Sarah, who shows up in Paris to take care of Macon. She informs Macon that she saw Muriel, and he tells her that she followed him to France on her own accord. Sarah becomes excited about having a second honeymoon with Macon while they’re in France. One night, she asks Macon why he didn’t do anything to stop Muriel from getting on the plane with him. Macon doesn’t have an answer and realizes he’s never made any major life decisions on his own. Everything that has happened to him has resulted from passively accepting things. He stays up all night thinking and eventually decides to return to Muriel, realizing she is better for him.

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"Yes, that is my son," the man says, identifying the body in the intensive care unit. Grief threatens to break his face into pieces, and then something closes shut inside of him. He has always had a very controlled nature, fearful of emotion and revelation, but now a true ice age begins, and after a year his wife tells him she wants a divorce. It is because he cannot seem to feel anything.

"The Accidental Tourist" begins on that note of emotional sterility, and the whole movie is a journey toward a smile at the end.

The man's name is Macon Leary ( William Hurt ), and he writes travel books for people who detest traveling. He advises his readers on how to avoid human contact, where to find "American food" abroad and how to convince themselves they haven't left home. His own life is the same sort of journey, and maybe it began in childhood. His sister and two brothers still live together in the house where they were born, and any life outside of their routine would be unthinkable.

Macon's wife ( Kathleen Turner ) moves out, leaving him with the dog, Edward, who does like to travel and is deeply disturbed by the curious life his masters have provided for him. He barks at ghosts and snaps at strangers. It is time for Macon to make another one of his overseas research trips, so he takes the dog to be boarded at a kennel, and that's where he meets Muriel Pritchett ( Geena Davis ). Muriel has Macon's number from the moment he walks through the door. She can see he's a basket case, but she thinks she can help. She also thinks her young son needs a father.

Macon isn't so sure. He doesn't use the number she gives him. But later, when the dog trips him and he breaks his leg, he takes Edward back to the kennel, and this time he submits to a little obedience training of his own. He agrees to acknowledge that Muriel exists, and before long they are sort of living together (lust still exists in his body, but it lurks so far from the center of his feelings that sex hardly seems to cheer him up).

The peculiarity about these central passages in the film is that they are quite cheerful and sometimes even very funny, even though Macon himself is mired in a deep depression. Davis, as Muriel, brings an unforced wackiness to her role in scenes like the one where she belts out a song while she's doing the dishes. But she is not as simple as she sometimes seems, and when Macon gets carried away with a little sentimental generalizing about the future, she warns him, "Don't make promises to my son that you are not prepared to keep." There is also great good humor in the characters in Macon's family: brothers Porter ( David Ogden Stiers ) and Charles ( Ed Begley Jr.) and sister Rose ( Amy Wright ), a matriarch who feeds the family, presides over their incomprehensible card games and supervises such traditional activities as alphabetizing the groceries on the kitchen shelves. One evening Macon takes his publisher, Julien ( Bill Pullman ), home to dinner and Julien is struck with a thunderbolt of love for Rose. He eventually marries her, but a few weeks later Julien tells Macon that Rose has moved back home with the boys; she was concerned that they had abandoned regular meals and were eating only gorp.

This emergency triggers the movie's emotional turning point, which is subtle but unmistakable. Nobody knows Rose as well as Macon does, and so he gives Julien some very particular advice: "Call her up and tell her your business is going to pieces. Ask if she could just come in and get things organized. Get things under control. Put it that way.

Use those words. Get things under control, tell her." In context, this speech is hilarious. It is also the first time in the film that Macon has been able to extend himself to help anybody, and it starts him on the road to emotional growth. Clinging to the sterility and loneliness that has been his protection, he doesn't realize at first that he has turned the corner. He still doubts that he needs Muriel, and when she buys herself a ticket and follows him to Paris, he refuses to have anything to do with her. When his wife also turns up in Paris, there is a moment when he thinks they may be able to patch things together again, and then finally Macon arrives at the sort of moment he has been avoiding all of his life: He has to make a choice. But by then the choice is obvious; he has already made it, by peeking so briefly out of his shell.

The screenplay for "The Accidental Tourist," by Kasdan and Frank Galati , is able to reproduce a lot of the tone and dialogue of the Anne Tyler novel without ever simply being a movie version of a book. The textures are too specific and the humor is too quirky and well-timed to be borrowed. The filmmakers have reinvented the same story in their own terms. The movie is a reunion for Kasdan, Hurt and Turner, who all three launched their careers with " Body Heat " (1981). Kasdan used Hurt again in " The Big Chill " (1983) and understands how to employ Hurt's gift for somehow being likable at the same time he seems to be withdrawn.

What Hurt achieves here seems almost impossible: He is depressed, low-key and intensely private through most of the movie, and yet somehow he wins our sympathy. What Kasdan achieves is just as tricky; I've never seen a movie so sad in which there was so much genuine laughter. "The Accidental Tourist" is one of the best films of the year.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film Credits

The Accidental Tourist (1989)

121 minutes

William Hurt as MacOn

Kathleen Turner as Sarah

Geena Davis as Muriel

Amy Wright as Rose

David Ogden Stiers as Porter

Ed Begley Jr. as Charles

Bill Pullman as Julian

Robert Gorman as Alexander

Bradley Mott as Mr. Loomis

Screenplay by

• Frank Galati
• John Williams

Photographed by

• John Bailey

Produced by

• Charles Okun
• Michael Grillo
• Carol Littleton

Based On The Novel by

Directed by.

• Lawrence Kasdan

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Anne Tyler: 'Up close you’ll always see things to be optimistic about'

Renowned for her extraordinary insights into ordinary lives, the award-winning novelist discusses family sagas and why she thinks she was a better writer when she was younger

W hen Anne Tyler ’s UK tour for her latest novel became an early victim of the coronavirus, and her publisher announced that the 78-year-old would be conducting all media interviews by phone from the safety of her home in Baltimore, Tyler felt some relief, but mainly she felt guilt. She is one of the world’s most acclaimed modern novelists, winner of both a Pulitzer (for Breathing Lessons , 1988) and the National Book Critics Circle award (for The Accidental Tourist , 1995, which was turned into an Oscar-winning film) and a finalist for the Man Booker ( A Spool of Blue Thread , 2015) and the Women’s prize for fiction ( Ladder of Years from 1995, and A Spool of Blue Thread ). But until 2012, she maintained a silence as assiduous as that of Thomas Pynchon or JD Salinger. She never liked – and still doesn’t, but needs must in today’s world – talking about how she does what she does, because that leads to self-consciousness, which is never good for creativity.

So she was “kind of relieved” when the tour was cancelled. “But I remember I used to pray the school would burn down before a math test the next day. Yet if it had actually burned down I would have felt so guilty. So now I’m thinking, ‘Oh dear, be careful what you wish for!’” she says.

Phone interviews are generally frustrating, a mess of missed connections and awkward interruptions. But Tyler has a manner that is as open and engaging as her prose, her conversation punctuated by charming anachronisms such as “bestir” and “alas”, and it soon feels as if I know her as well as I know her brilliantly drawn characters. As I, too, am now working from home I start by apologising for the background noise of children and dogs. “Oh I love to hear children and dogs! That sounds good to me. I love normal life,” she says.

For the past half-century, Tyler has been the pre-eminent novelist of normal life. She is famously good at summing up a character in a precise line (“She had not grown fuller or softer with age. She was like certain supermarket vegetables that turn from green to withered without ever ripening” – from Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant , 1982), but twice she tells me she is “no good at plot, as I’m sure you’ve noticed”. It’s true that no one would mistake aTyler novel for a John Grisham, but no one can match her evocation of the moments that build up a life: the awkward family meals, the day your spouse suddenly seems like a stranger, trying to make sense of how you have become the adult you are today, the conflicted gestures we make at trying to be good. “Time passing is a plot. You can’t not have something happen if the years go by,” she says.

As a child, Tyler’s favourite book was the American classic The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton, about a house watching a city sprout up around it. Her fans – who have ranged from John Updike to Jacqueline Wilson to Nick Hornby – will recognise her memory of hoping the school would burn down as classic Tyler: her novels are studded with adult characters evoking childhood sensations, pleating time, revealing the truth of the adult through the child they were. In 2018’s Clock Dance , a widow compares recovering from grief to “rainy days in her childhood when she would resign herself to staying in, reading or watching daytime TV, and then in the afternoon the sun would break through unexpectedly and she would think, Oh. I guess I can go outside now. Isn’t that … a good thing, I guess.” In The Accidental Tourist , Macon Leary empathetically imagines his young son Ethan’s last moments before he was killed in a violent crime: “meekly moving to the kitchen with the others, placing his hands flat against the wall as he was ordered and no doubt bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet”.

“I’m more in touch with my emotions and the visceral sensory from childhood than any other part of life. I don’t know if it helps with creativity, but I do know that when I talk to other writers they talk about their childhood in great detail,” Tyler says. (She also still has residues of that childlike belief that one can make something happen by thinking about it. Just as she used to worry she would cause the school to burn down through wishing it, when I ask how she could bear to write the scene of Ethan’s murder in The Accidental Tourist , she says she deliberately made him younger than her two daughters were then, “so I wouldn’t think as they came up to that age, ‘Oh no, what have I set in motion?’”)

Her new novel, Redhead by the Side of the Road , her 23rd, features many of the usual Tyler tropes. Its protagonist, Micah, is a man, as so many of Tyler’s greatest characters are, which is partly why she has so many male fans. Writing in this paper in 2012, Mark Lawson put her cross-gender appeal down to the way “she deals sympathetically and redemptively with male fecklessness and helplessness”. Tyler grew up with three brothers and was happily married for 34 years to Taghi Mohammad Modarressi, an Iranian psychiatrist, until his death in 1997. “I am very comfortable writing as a man, and I think that’s because I had really good men in my life. They made me feel comfortable and I thought, ‘OK, they’re not so different from me,’” she says.

Like many of Tyler’s male characters – Ian in Saint Maybe , Barnaby in A Patchwork Planet , Jesse in Breathing Lessons , Ezra in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant – Micah has let his life drift past him after a youthful regret. Like Macon in The Accidental Tourist , he tries to counter the loss of control over his life by adhering to self-coined rules about when he cleans the kitchen, how he makes the bed, how he drives. “Micah” even sounds like “Macon”, but when I ask Tyler if the echo was deliberate she says no. “But I do often have fantasies about my characters ending up in the same little part of town and running into one another, so I can picture Micah and Macon doing that.”

Like all of Tyler’s characters, Micah lives in Baltimore, as Tyler herself has done for more than 50 years. She has said that she’s a writer so she can live out different lives, but it seems that whatever life she imagines, she always wants to live in Baltimore. “Yes, that’s probably true. It’s a city with character, but it is also laziness on my part – by setting the book here I don’t have to do much research,” she says with easy self-deprecation. I cannot let that pass: her books are full of meticulous research, such as the accurate period details in her decades-spanning family sagas, The Amateur Marriage and A Spool of Blue Thread . She meticulously writes her books out in longhand multiple times, and then reads them into a recorder and listens back to make sure the dialogue suits each character and there are no clangers. The idea that Tyler defaults to anything in her books out of laziness is nonsense – she just loves her city.

“It’s true, I do love it,” she says. “It’s funny, it was a total accident that I came to the city, it was just for my husband’s job. For the first two years we were saying, ‘We made a mistake, let’s go back.’ But then you sink in, little by little.”

Unlike her other novels, Redhead by the Side of the Road features multiple references to current events. Micah avoids watching the news because it’s too “depressing”, but he can’t block out the “unspeakably sad” bulletins from his clock radio: “a mass shooting in a synagogue; whole families are dying in Yemen; immigrant children torn from their parents will never, ever be the same, even if by some unlikely chance they are reunited tomorrow.”

“I was writing the book already by the time Trump was in office and all that was going on. So I consciously felt it would be immoral to pretend life was just la la la. I don’t want to be one of those people who ties their novel to current events so it’s practically out of a newspaper, but at the same time I felt I should mention that it is an unhappy time,” she says. Her books often end optimistically, showing human kindness. But is she having trouble maintaining that optimism about humanity in the current political climate? She hesitates for a second. “Not up close, if you know what I mean. Up close you’ll always see things to be optimistic about.”

Tyler grew up in Quaker communities around the south and midwest, the eldest of four children. She did not attend mainstream school until she was 11, and a common theme in her books is a character looking at the “normal” world and trying to understand how it works, such as Micah feeling bewildered by the happy couples he sees on his morning jogs, or Aaron flummoxed by marriage in The Beginner’s Goodbye : “It seemed we just never quite got the hang of being a couple the way other people did. We should have taken lessons or something; that’s what I tell myself.”

“One of the first things that happened when I joined the school was I was surrounded by these girls and they were asking me all these questions. One said, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’m only 11.’ And she said, ‘I know, do you have a boyfriend?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, I’m in another world here.’ It was very tough to figure out, and I remember it very clearly,” Tyler says. While at university, she started to write short stories, and then published her first novel, The Tin Can Tree, when she was 23. Aside from a five-year break to raise her daughters, she has written steadily ever since.

“I know the world does not need another book from me, but I have nothing else to do with myself. I have no hobbies. So then I feel guilty when I say to my agent, ‘I seem to have another book ready if you want to take a look at it …’” she says. Her ideal day would involve several hours of “good involved writing, the kind when you suddenly look up and three hours have gone by”.

While liking Tyler’s books is as uncontroversial as liking chocolate, there have been some criticisms over the years, some more fair than others. Those who dismiss her as sentimental (“our foremost NutraSweet novelist”, one American critic wrote) overlook the biting humour in her work. “Repetitive” is more merited, although the familiar plots are shells for her elegant writing and characterisation, which are never boring. Yet I’ve found some of her more recent novels less satisfying than her mid-career peak of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant , The Accidental Tourist and Breathing Lessons . The New York Times’ former book critic Michiko Kakutani put it more strongly in 2012 when she complained that instead of the “intimate knowledge of her characters’ inner lives” we get in Tyler’s earlier books, the characters in The Beginner’s Goodbye are “irritating stick figures”.

But Tyler is her own best critic. She recently reread The Accidental Tourist for the first time in many years. “And one of the things I thought was, ‘I think I was a better writer when I was younger.’” What made her think that? “I was more detailed, I took more time. It’s not as if I’m in a rush now, but I trust the reader more. I don’t feel like I have to say that much about the character’s inner feelings. But then as I read The Accidental Tourist I thought, ‘Well, it’s kind of nice to see all of Macon’s inner feelings there.’” Aptly for a writer who always sees the best in her characters, Tyler’s mistake was perhaps trusting some of her readers too much.

Her daughters live in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and Tyler knows she has a tendency towards self-isolation, whether there’s a global pandemic or not, “and I don’t think that’s always healthy”. So “to bring the world into me”, she has – when life is normal – regular nights at her home with friends, including a weekly friendship group she calls “Wine Therapy”. She is already working on her next book, “and once again, it’s about a family and set in Baltimore”, she says in a tone of pure self-mockery. Then with the grace that comes from a lifetime of self-knowledge, sinking in little by little, she adds, “And I love all that.”

Redhead by the Side of the Road is published by Chatto.

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Revisit: the accidental tourist.

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The late, great Roger Ebert once called Lawrence Kasdan’s 1988 drama The Accidental Tourist , the most delightful film of the year, but “also seemingly one of the most depressing.” That’s an accurate description of this gentle and sympathetic comedy about a man mourning the loss of his son. Kasdan’s film is so impossibly well-managed tonally that one finishes it in a kind of daze. Scenes of purely human comedy and tragedy with a tempo as relaxed and unpredictable as life itself play against the backdrop of a story about grief and, in some ways, coming back to the land of the living.

Kasdan, the great filmmaker behind 1983’s The Big Chill and 1991’s Grand Canyon , is the reason for this expertly executed tightrope walk. Adapted from Anne Tyler’s novel of the same name, the film follows Macon Leary (William Hurt), an author of travel guidebooks whose marriage to Sarah (Kathleen Turner) is slowly disintegrating a year after the murder of their son Ethan. Ethan was the lone victim of an armed robbery, and Macon is still haunted by the fatherhood of which he was cheated by total chance. To put the nail in the coffin, Sarah announces one morning that she is leaving Macon and has rented an apartment in the city.

The set-up perhaps doesn’t pass the smell test of comic potential, but as scripted by Kasdan and Frank Galati, the movie is a comedy about people rather than their situations. We chuckle and smile upon recognizing the natures of these characters and their witty and sometimes sardonic interactions, but we aren’t meant to guffaw at slapstick or scatology. Simply through the performances by Hurt and Turner, and Geena Davis as another significant character (as well as Amy Wright, David Ogden Stiers and Ed Begley Jr. as Macon’s idiosyncratic siblings), we fall into the unique and downright huggable rhythms of these people. This is most apparent in the first encounter between Macon and Muriel Pritchett (Davis), the canine trainer whose kennel boards Macon’s dog Edward when Macon must take one of his trips to write a new guidebook.

The chemistry between Macon and Muriel – between Hurt and Davis – is palpable right from the start, though the grieving Macon is unable to see it. We notice Muriel’s eyes and demeanor, though, immediately drawn to this handsome man and taken by his manner of speaking and his pure emotional honesty. In his grief, the man has let his guard down a little, and Hurt does an enormously effective job of differentiating the character’s interactions with this woman, whom he likes and is amused by but does not know, and with Sarah, whom he knows very well but no longer feels any connection to.

Davis, in an Academy Award-winning performance, is phenomenal in her reading of Muriel as a woman who falls quickly and desperately in love with this sad-eyed and bewildered man, technically abusing her position as his dog’s temporary caretaker to check in on Edward after their business relationship has ended and taking it upon herself to invite him to dinner. The relationship blossoms – not out of a sense of falsely romantic hullabaloo but out of a necessity on the part of these people, both having recently undergone divorces, to connect with another human. Almost serendipitously, then, Macon and Muriel have found each other.

As follows with the unpredictability of life, the movie has surprises in store – among them being the fact that romances can move more like rollercoasters than straight paths. Macon and Sarah reconcile after a realization of each person’s priorities, and they later fall apart again, not because the story needs them to but because the characters seem so real, so genuine, and so fragile. We come to realize that Macon and Muriel would have been better served to be together for as long as Macon and Sarah have, but through coincidence that places the latter pairing in their home once more, the characters also receive an opportunity to learn that lesson in a hard, truthful way.

In case one hadn’t realized just yet, The Accidental Tourist is not really driven by plot, though a pair of events does cause a minimal amount of drama as it enters its final third. A back injury handicaps Macon on his trip to Paris, where Muriel and Sarah (unbeknownst to each other) have followed him in order to win him back and to be his caregiver, respectively. This leads not to false drama or histrionics but to another hard truth for everyone involved. It’s also followed by a final scene that, with a nod and a reciprocated smile (and, for what it’s worth, almost no dialogue), perfectly caps a gentle, honest comedy about fundamentally good, flawed people.

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The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

• Publication Date: April 9, 2002
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• ISBN-10: 0345452003
• ISBN-13: 9780345452009
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The Accidental Tourist

by Anne Tyler

The accidental tourist themes.

Before The Accidental Tourist has even begun, Macon and Sarah Leary have lost their son in a tragic and senseless way. This loss has directly led to their own relationship also disintegrating. Throughout the book, we see how the couple separately deals with their grief. For Macon, it is a particularly difficult struggle. Instead of trying to confront his pain head-on, he suppresses it with his many strange "systems" of organization that he implements, reflecting this resistance to fully dealing with his own emotions. Among all of the Leary siblings, there is this common reluctance to acknowledge the reality of death and loss. Macon is frustrated by the way no one has uttered Ethan 's name since he was killed; it is not until his niece Susan speaks about Ethan that it occurs to Macon that others also mourn his son.

As the book progresses, Macon somewhat comes to terms with Ethan's death, realizing that the only way to truly heal from grief is not to forget Ethan but rather to imagine him as still alive through memory, co-existing in a parallel realm. Yet Macon's ultimate choice at the end of the book—to leave Sarah for Muriel Pritchett —also demonstrates that part of him wants to start anew and cast his old life with Ethan and Sarah into the past, in order to protect himself from more potential loss and have some sense of control over his destiny.

Love and the loss of it haunt the entirety of The Accidental Tourist . The story shows Macon grappling to discover the true meaning of love. It is clear that he loves Sarah and his son Ethan, but he has lost both of them. As a result, Macon struggles with motivation to live, feeling that, through loss, love has been taken from him. Yet Macon gradually comes to recognize that connections with others—whether it be with his deceased son or his estranged ex-wife—endure, despite separation. This is one of the central currents of the novel.

Macon is faced with distinguishing between comfort and true love. When he first parts from Sarah, he misses her deeply and can't imagine life with any other woman; Sarah is the one who "gets" him and his eccentricities. When Muriel crosses his path, he initially resists opening up to her, but when he finally does, he is magnetized into her very different and colorful world. He falls in love with Muriel for totally different reasons than his attraction to Sarah; her contrasting nature helps Macon to come further out of his shell and embrace the messiness of life that he has long feared. For him, this is a new view of love that is something beyond his comfortable routine. His ultimate choice to be with Muriel over Sarah, despite his persevering feelings for his first wife, is a decision to embrace the sort of love that challenges him and helps him to become a better person.

Macon has a strong tendency to isolate himself, whether it be physically or emotionally. After Ethan dies, he locks himself even more deeply in his own emotions, refusing to share his thoughts and pains with his wife Sarah, leading to their separation. Macon often reflects on how he has difficulty communicating with others and has isolated himself in a sort of shell that prevents genuine contact with the outside world. Yet this is his comfort zone, and he has a hard time leaving it. Ironically, Macon writes tour guides for a living, but even when he ventures off to exotic foreign cities, he remains in his own bubble, staying in hotel rooms until he can fly back home again to familiar surroundings. He even hides behind a large book on every plane and train ride in order to avoid any social interaction. Starting a relationship with Muriel is one way Macon starts to come out of his isolation to embrace a different type of life.

One common characteristic of the Leary family is the need for control. Macon, for instance, uses a highly controlled routine to feel safe in the world. After a tumultuous childhood, where their unstable mother Alicia was frequently moving the children around, the Leary siblings have learned to cope through implementing strict and often strange modes of organization. This is exemplified after Macon's separation, when he invents bizarre ways of dealing with chores, such as creating a "body bag" so he does not have to wash his linens. His sister Rose is also fond of tightly organizing the household regimen, demonstrated in the way she alphabetically arranges the groceries.

Yet even with all the effort to control, Macon is still left helpless when it comes to his unruly pet dog, Edward . Of course, Edward is merely a mirror for the emotional chaos that Macon suppresses through his carefully planned "systems." The process of training Edward runs parallel to Macon beginning to allow his own inner fears to be tamed, coming out of his self-imposed alienation to date Muriel. He starts to realize that despite his desire for stability, life will never be controllable or predictable: even after the tragedy of losing his son, he still must open up and take risks in life.

Eccentricity

Many of Anne Tyler 's characters in The Accidental Tourist are highly eccentric. This is ironic, considering that Macon and Sarah crave to live some elusive "normal" life after the death of their son. They begin to tire of the eccentricities of one another. Sarah, especially, has grown weary of the Leary family's peculiar habits and rituals, such as the endless rules to their after-dinner card games. Both Sarah and Macon discover, however, that "normal" does not really exist. Macon dates Muriel, who has a slew of her own strange qualities. Sarah dates a man whose eccentricities bother her, to the point that she cuts off the relationship.

Macon, who is a quietly observant character, often notes the strange people who populate his neighborhood or the foreign places he visits. His awareness of the little quirks of others brings him a sort of comfort and deeper understanding of humanity, even while he keeps his distance. For instance, the highly frightened old woman he meets on one plane ride helps him to feel more stable and normal.

Modern marriage

The marriage of Macon and Sarah—along with its dissolution—is a central component of the novel. In older times, marriage was seen as an unbreakable vow, where the couple is supposed to work out differences for the sake of the union. In more modern times, divorce has become extremely common, with slight disagreements becoming fodder to permanently part ways. This is at play in Macon's relationship, where the death of a child draws the two apart instead of bringing them closer. In this time period (the 1980s), it has become more acceptable to take space apart in order to figure out which each partner truly wants. Even when Macon is with Muriel, he declines her marriage proposal, remarking that the formality of marriage is overrated. In one way, we can see Macon's point of view, yet in another, it is clear that Macon's argument is less a philosophical one than it is a reflection of his fear of commitment.

Good and evil

Even in the seemingly tranquil suburban setting that Anne Tyler's characters occupy, the battle between good and evil appears as a prominent theme in the story. Macon and Sarah's son, Ethan, has been killed randomly and brutally while at a fast-food restaurant. This senseless death shatters his parents' lives, waking them up to the fact that evil is not an abstract concept but rather something that can deeply touch anyone at any time. After Ethan's murder, Sarah in particular struggles with living in what she now considers to be a dark and evil world.

Despite the obvious evilness that lurks in society, Macon comes to see that there is also much good, such as in the benevolent encounters he has with strangers while traveling. In this way, the novel underscores the idea that good and evil begin in the small and trivial interactions of daily life and that each person has the choice of which side they wish to perpetuate.

The Accidental Tourist Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Accidental Tourist is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Standing water in the road is compared to a wide lake.

A wide lake, it seemed, in the center of the highway crashed against the underside of the car and slammed it to the right.

How does Macon meet Muriel?

Macon meets Muriel when he hires her to train his dog.

How is Macon described in Chapter 1?

From the text:

He was a tall, pale, gray-eyed man, with straight fair hair cut close to his head, and his skin was that thin kind that easily burns.

Study Guide for The Accidental Tourist

The Accidental Tourist study guide contains a biography of Anne Tyler, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Accidental Tourist
• The Accidental Tourist Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Accidental Tourist

The Accidental Tourist essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler.

• The Accidental Acceptance: Family and Modernity in 'The Accidental Tourist' and 'Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant'

Lesson Plan for The Accidental Tourist

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Accidental Tourist
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Accidental Tourist Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Accidental Tourist

• Introduction
• Plot summary

• CBSE Notes For Class 9
• Class 9 English Notes and Summary
• Supplementary Chapter 9 The Accidental Tourist

The Accidental Tourist Summary & Notes - CBSE Class 9 English Moments

According to the CBSE Syllabus 2023-24, this chapter has been removed from  NCERT Class 9 English (Moments) textbook .

Summary of The Accidental Tourist

The Accidental Tourist is a story which reflects the humorous travel experiences of the author. He encounters unexpected hassles while travelling that call for trouble and embarrasses him immensely. Read the prose summary of CBSE Class 9 English Prose Notes – The Accidental Tourist in CBSE English Notes Class 9 format here to explore in detail. We hope this summary will help students to understand this chapter easily and prepare for their English exam with confidence.

Students can also learn how to write an effective essay by going through the essays to increase marks in Class 9 English papers.

CBSE Class 9 English The Accidental Tourist Summary

The Accidental Tourist is an entertaining story written by Bill Bryson, where he reflects on his travel experiences humorously. He casually describes the various incidents that took place while he was travelling to different places. He often acts clumsily and finds it difficult to manage things systematically. He wonders how other people do their regular work easily without any difficulty. A couple of times, he fails to locate the washroom in the movie theatre and ends up standing in a narrow passage of the door that locks by itself. He has a hard time living a normal life like other people and wonders how others do it so effortlessly.

Once, the author was travelling to England with his family during Easter. After reaching Logan Airport in Boston, while they were checking in, he abruptly remembered that he had joined the British Airways’ frequent flyer programme. He recollected that he had put the card in the carry-on bag that was dangling around his neck. When he tried opening the bag, the zip was clogged, and he exerted pressure to open it. In the process, the zip snapped, and everything that was kept inside the bag started spilling all over the place. Meanwhile, the author also noticed that his finger was injured and trapped in the zip. He was terrified at the sight that his finger was bleeding extensively.

Further, the author mentions the unexpected troubles that he encounters while travelling. In one such instance, while travelling in an aeroplane, he leaned over to tie his shoelace. Unfortunately, he was stuck when the person sitting ahead of him fully reclined his seat. With great difficulty, he freed himself from that cramped position. In another instance, he spilt some soft drinks on his co-passenger. Although the flight attendant cleaned up the mess, the author spilt another drink on the same passenger again. The lady was completely drenched and annoyed at the author for the inconvenience he caused her.

However, his worst experience on a flight was when he was writing in a notebook, and he sucked on the tip of the pen. At that time, he was also talking to a lady. Later when he went to the washroom, he saw that the pen had leaked unknowingly and ended up colouring his teeth, tongue and mouth in blue colour ink. He ended up feeling awkward for being so clumsy. Although the author is a gentleman, he always ends up in some cumbersome situation. His wife was well aware of his clumsiness. So, whenever food was delivered on the flight, she would instruct her children to remove the lid off the food for their father so that they could avoid any mishap from happening.

Nonetheless, the author clarifies that such unforeseen situations occur, particularly when he is travelling with his family. Whenever he travels alone, things work perfectly as he quietly sits on his seat and avoids tying his shoelaces if required. He avoids making mistakes while he is travelling on his own. He admits that he has been careless in updating his frequent flyer card due to time constraints. On multiple occasions, he either forgot to request the air miles from the airline authorities, or sometimes the airline didn’t record it on time. Furthermore, he mentions that there were instances when the airline informed him that he was not entitled to use air miles. Once due to a mismatch in his name on the ticket, he could not use his air miles and was left ineligible to travel to Bali on a first-class ticket.

Conclusion of The Accidental Tourist

The chapter – The Accidental Tourist teaches students that it is important to be organised and systematic in our lives, especially while travelling. We should be well-prepared; otherwise, we are likely to encounter unexpected mishaps like the author. Here, we brought you the CBSE Class 9 English Moments Prose Summary of The Accidental Tourist that will help students to have a solid insight into the chapter.

Besides, BYJU’S offers a huge collection of resources such as CBSE Notes and CBSE study materials . They can download BYJU’S – The Learning App and also check out CBSE sample papers and question papers.

Frequently Asked Questions on CBSE Class 9 English The Accidental Tourist

Why is it important for a student to be organised in life.

For students, being organised is particularly important since it helps them learn how to prioritise activities, set and achieve goals and reduce stress.

How should one be conscious and aware during travel?

1. Don’t drink bottled water from unknown shops/people 2. Avoid the tourist trap locations 3. Travel in off-season 4. Choose proper accommodation

What is the meaning of ‘unforeseen situation’?

Any situation that is not anticipated or expected is called an ‘unforeseen situation’.

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