Seeing things

There is no redhead by the side of the road in Anne Tyler's 2020 novel Redhead by the Side of the Road. It is just a red fire hydrant that the nearsighted Micah Mortimer sees as a woman when he goes running every morning without his glasses.

Yet his vision doesn't really seem to be that bad. On one of his runs near the end of the novel, Micah slows down when he sees a feeble old man open his car door "with one crabbed hand" before getting inside. He can see a "crabbed hand" but not a fire hydrant? But no, Tyler makes it clear that the redhead has more to do with Micah's imagination than his vision. He converts "inanimate objects into human beings" because of his loneliness. He wishes there were a redhead by the side of the road.

Nearing 40, Micah lives alone in Baltimore and manages a one-man computer repair business out of his home. His life is orderly to the point of running at a certain time each morning and cleaning his kitchen a certain of the week.

He has had a series of short-lived love affairs, including one with a teacher named Cass, which ends early in the novel for reasons he fails to understand.

Then Brink, a college boy, shows up at his door believing Micah might be his real father. He is the son of Lorna, Micah's college girlfriend. Micah knows Brink cannot be his son because he and Lorna never had sex together, but Brink reconnects him briefly with Lorna. She explains her version of why they broke up nearly two decades earlier. And that leads Micah to take control of his life, although Tyler's ending may actually suggest just the opposite. Is he taking control or surrendering? And is there a difference?

Much shorter than a typical Anne Tyler novel, Redhead is irresistible.