The Books: “The Accidental Tourist” (Anne Tyler)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler

I have so many personal associations with this book that I’m not even sure how to write about it – as a book, I mean. It’s really what brought my first boyfriend and me together … 5 million years ago. I still have the copy he gave to me in that long-ago summer with a note from him in the front. He was older than I was – not by much – 6 or 7 years – but I was 20 years old, so that’s a HUGE age difference. Now it wouldn’t be anything. Hell, 20 years is no longer a big age difference – but back then it was. I was in college, he was in law school, totally different times in our lives. We had known each other for years – I had met him when I was 16. See? I have to talk about all of this before I talk about the book itself. To me, he was a glamorous older guy – my good friend – but not someone I would have thought of romantically. Mainly I felt he was out of my league. You know, I was 20 years old. A late bloomer. A virgin. I had had a boyfriend in college, sort of – but nothing serious or lasting. The guy who would be my first serious boyfriend seemed way more grown-up than me, and always was dating some hot intimidating WOMAN, so I never “crushed” on him because – what would the point of THAT be? But we were good friends, and one summer we started hanging out a lot. Having a blast. (He was such a fun person.) He happened to be reading The Accidental Tourist at the time. I was working 2 or 3 jobs, and he would show up at my place of work, just to say Hi. He would bring me ice coffee. We spent entire days at the beach. We had adventures in a small outboard motor, tooling around Newport, pulling up to docks alongside gigantic YACHTS – and going into whatever bar was there and having a Bloody Mary. I had a cocktail dress in my bag, so we would stroll up the dock, in our flip-flops and shorts, towards some glamorous restaurant, slip into the bathrooms, change into our dress-up duds, and meet at the bar. Then we would go back to the restrooms, change back into our flip-flops and shorts and go back into our outboard motor, and put-put over to the NEXT bar to do it again. Bar-hopping via outboard motor. I was so naive that I had no idea I was being courted. Antonio (that was his name) told me later that it was reading The Accidental Tourist, with its two misfit lead characters, that made him take another look at me, and start to fall in love with me. Much later, I would see that as an insult. Oh, so, I’m a MISFIT, THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE SAYING?? But at the time, it was that book that brought us together. He begged me to read it. He gave me a copy with a blunt note in the front … something that made me think (FINALLY): “Huh…… is something going on here???” Well, there was, and I read the book, and loved it, and Antonio eventually made his move, and whatever, we were together for four years. Ancient freakin’ history. The interesting thing is: Antonio was very much like an Anne Tyler character. He had his “way” of doing things and anything that deviated was a deviation – not just a different way of doing things. He considered his way the default. I am, to put it mildly, not that way at ALL. Who cares if you cut the bell pepper longwise or crosswise? I honestly would need a bone marrow transplant in order to give a shit about stuff like that. I think Antonio saw himself in that book – and saw that maybe it would be okay if he let himself fall in love with the freckled crazy girl in glasses who had messy handwriting and was kind of clumsy. I mean, I think that’s how he saw me! He loved me, don’t get me wrong – and we actually still love each other – he’s one of my favorite people ever, always will be … but he had to convince himself that a “deviation” from his norm would be okay, that I would be safe, he would be okay with me. He had never dated anyone like me. His girlfriends were either breezy sophisticated types wearing colored heels and sundresses or hard-bodied tomboy types who liked to ski and windsurf and bungee jump. Uhm, yeah, so, I was neither. I liked to read Anne of Green Gables and I liked to write in my diary, and I enjoyed going skinny dipping in the ocean after my shift at the pizza joint. I was loyal to my family on an almost tribal level. Still am. I was an actress. I had a depressive streak. I had great friends. This whole thing was a “deviation” for Antonio and it stressed him out. I am still convinced that we were not meant to be together – and I’m shocked it lasted as long as it did – my not giving a crap about which way to cut the peppers became a metaphor for our differences. NOW I would have no problem handling the situation and telling someone to chill out, don’t tell me how to cut a pepper, I’m a grown woman, there’s not only one way to do things. But then I couldn’t defend myself. It was a mess. BUT. In that first summer, it was all tremendously exciting!! Still one of the best summers I’ve ever had.

Anne Tyler is the storyteller of people with Asperger’s, basically. All of her characters are fussy, a bit antisocial, and have OCD-level organizational skills. I’ve read some of her other books, but never really got into them because The Accidental Tourist was such an important book to me – my experience with Anne Tyler kind of began and ended there. I know she’s a big deal, one of the most successful American writers writing today … and she’s marvelous, she really is – The Accidental Tourist is a terrific book. Heartbreaking. The film made of the book was not too bad, either! I feel like the film really got what it was about those two people that made them fit so perfectly together, eventually. It’s an odd pairing and on the face of it makes NO sense.

Macon Leary is a lonely man, who has split from his wife in the wake of their son’s murder. All of the underlying problems in their marriage (he is a systematic OCD kind of guy – she is impulsive) come screaming to the forefront once their son is gone (he was murdered in a Burger Bonanaza during a field trip at summer camp). Macon Leary lives alone, and we get scenes of him washing dishes – in his own particular way (he has a “way” for everything) – and he keeps imagining that his ex-wife is watching him at all times, kind of smirking at his fussiness, and shaking her head in contempt. Macon kind of fell into travel writing – the details are lost to me – but he got some assignment to write a travel piece, and the way he wrote it was so funny that the editor asked him to do a series. Basically, he writes about travel for reluctant fearful travelers. Macon Leary does not enjoy travel. He finds it unbearable. For such a rigid guy, all of that change – and having to figure things out in a foreign land – are unbearably stressful – and he writes his travel pieces in that tone. It’s all about comfort. Where is the McDonalds in Amsterdam? You can get Sweet ‘n Low in Beijing, you just have to ask. Make sure you stay here at this hotel, because it looks most like a Holiday Inn in Iowa. You know: looking for signs of home even in another country. His travel pieces hit a nerve, and so he has written a series of books for “The Accidental Tourist”. He writes for people who want to pretend they have never left home.

Macon can’t stand the travel, but he loves the writing part of it. Not a happy man. Full of regrets and fear. He comes from a family of fussbudgets – his sister alphabetizes her spice rack, it is desperately important – and marriage doesn’t seem to really be “for” these people. Macon’s marriage was an anomaly. So now that he is back to single status, he goes over to his siblings’ house and they play cards, and it’s like they’re back in childhood now – only they are all middle-aged.

It’s kind of disturbing.

In the middle of all of this, Macon brings his dog to an obedience school – where he meets Muriel, a dog expert. She’s got frizzy hair. She’s rather kooky. And she doesn’t have many boundaries. Like, she calls Macon at home. Macon is so rigid that anything deviating from his small path of normal feels like a threat, or unbearably painful. After all, he couldn’t protect his son from going on a simple outing to a burger joint. The world is a tremendously dangerous and unpredictable place. Better to just hunker down, walk in a straight line, and don’t disturb anyone. Muriel doesn’t play by those rules. She wants to talk about his dog.

And you know, the details are lost to me … but slowly, inevitably, Macon starts to fall in love with Muriel. But because he’s Macon – because he’s an Anne Tyler character – love actually feels like stress, rather than love. That was not something I personally related to as a 20 year old girl … but boy is it something I relate to now. Love feels like stress … I know it’s not … but this is not a rational thing we’re talking about here. We’re talking about matters of the heart. If you’re a rigid person, stuck in your ways (and I am) – then anything that comes along and pushes you, or messes up your schedule … feels wrong. It takes Macon forever to realize that Muriel is not wrong, and that stress is actually love.

Tyler is a wonderful writer (as you’ll see in the excerpt below) – and quite funny. She has great compassion for her Asperger’s-syndrome characters – she’s probably got a lot of those qualities herself, she writes about it so well.

I’ve only read the book once, way back then, during that sunny endless summer when I fell in love for the first time. It seems caught in that moment in time, for me. I have no desire to re-read it – and actually considered skipping it for my Daily Book Excerpt – because it’s so potent and such a carrier of memories. But I’ve got my own OCD going on, and what I call adult-onset Asperger’s, and I felt I couldn’t skip the book, even with all the associations, so here it is.

Here’s an excerpt. Macon is having dinner with his siblings.

EXCERPT FROM The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler

When his brothers came home from work, the house took on a relaxed, relieved atmosphere. Rose drew the living room curtains and lit a few soft lamps. Charles and Porter changed into sweaters. Macon started mixing his special salad dressing. He believed that if you pulverized the spices first with a marble mortar and pestle, it made all the difference. The others agreed that no one else’s dressing tasted as good as Macon’s. “Since you’ve been gone,” Charles told him, “we’ve had to buy that bottled stuff from the grocery store.” He made it sound as if Macon had been gone a few weeks or so – as if his entire marriage had been just a brief trip elsewhere.

For supper they had Rose’s pot roast, a salad with Macon’s dressing, and baked potatoes. Baked potatoes had always been their favorite food. They had learned to fix them as children, and even after they were big enough to cook a balanced meal they used to exist solely on baked potatoes whenever Alicia left them to their own devices. There was something about the smell of a roasting Idaho that was so cozy, and also, well, conservative, was the way Macon put it to himself. He thought back on years and years of winter evenings, the kitchen windows black outside, the corners furry with gathering darkness, the four of them seated at the chipped enamel table meticulously filling scooped-out potato skins with butter. You let the butter melt in the skins while you mashed and seasoned the floury insides; the skins were saved till last. It was almost a ritual. He recalled that once, during one of their mother’s longer absences, her friend Eliza had served them what she called potato boats – restuffed, not a bit like the genuine article. The children, with pinched, fastidious expressions, had emptied the stuffing and proceeded as usual with the skins, pretending to overlook her mistake. The skins should be crisp. They should not be salted. The pepper should be freshly ground. Paprika was acceptable, but only if it was American. Hungarian paprika had too distinctive a taste. Personally, Macon could do without paprika altogether.

While they ate, Porter discussed what to do with his children. Tomorrow was his weekly visitation night, when he would drive over to Washington, where his children lived with their mother. “The thing of it is,” he said, “eating out in restaurants is so artificial. It doesn’t seem like real food. And anyway, they all three have different tastes. They always argue over where to go. Someone’s on a diet, someone’s turned vegetarian, someone can’t stand food that crunches. And I end up shouting, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, we’re going to Such-and-Such and that’s that!’ So we go and everybody sulks throughout the meal.”

“Maybe you should just not visit,” Charles said reasonably. (He had never had children of his own.)

“Well, of course I want to visit, Charles. I just wish we had some different program. You know what would be ideal? If we could all do something with tools together. I mean like the old days before the divorce, when Danny helped me drain the hot water heater or Susan sat on a board I was sawing. If I could just drop by their house, say, and June and her husband could go to a movie or something, then the kids and I would clean the gutters, weatherstrip the windows, wrap the hot water pipes … Well, that husband of hers is no use at all, you can bet he lets his hot water pipes sit around naked. I’d bring my own tools, even. We’d have a fine time! Susan could fix us cocoa. Then at the end of the evening I’d pack up my tools and off I’d go, leaving the house in perfect repair. Why, June ought to jump at the chance.”

“Then why not suggest it,” Macon said.

“Nah. She’d never go for it. She’s so impractical. I said to her last week, I said, ‘You know that front porch step is loose? Springing up from its nails every time you walk on it wrong.’ She said, ‘Oh, Lord, yes, it’s been that way,’ as if Providence had decreed it. As if nothing could be done about it. They’ve got leaves in the gutter from way last winter but leaves are natural after all; why go against nature. She’s so impractical.”

Porter himself was the most practical man Macon had ever known. He was the only Leary who understood money. His talent with money was what kept the family firm solvent – if just barely. It wasn’t a very wealthy business. Grandfather Leary had founded it in the early part of the century as a tinware factory, and turned to bottle caps in 1915. The Bottle Cap King, he called himself, and was called in his obituary, but in fact most bottle caps were manufactured by Crown Cork and always had been; Grandfather Leary ran a distant second or third. His only son, the Bottle Cap Prince, had barely assumed his place in the firm before quitting to volunteer for World War II – a far more damaging enthusiasm, it turned out, than any of Alicia’s. After he was killed the business limped along, never quite succeeding and never quite failing, till Porter bounced in straight from college and took over the money end. Money to Porter was something almost chemical – a volatile substance that reacted in various interesting ways when combined with other substances. He wasn’t what you’d call mercenary; he didn’t want the money for its own sake but for its intriguing possibilities, and in fact when his wife divorced him he handed over most of his property without a word of complaint.

It was Porter who ran the company, pumping in money and ideas. Charles, more mechanical, dealt with the production end. Macon had done a little of everything when he worked there, and had wasted away with boredom doing it, for there wasn’t really enough to keep a third man busy. It was only for symmetry’s sake that Porter kept urging him to return. “Tell you what, Macon,” he said now, “why not hitch a ride down with us tomorrow and look over your old stomping ground?”

“No, thanks,” Macon told him.

“Plenty of room for your crutches in back.”

“Maybe some other time.”

They followed Rose around while she washed the dishes. She didn’t like them to help because she had her own method, she said. She moved soundlessly through the old-fashioned kitchen, replacing dishes in the high wooden cabinets. Charles took the dog out; Macon couldn’t manage his crutches in the spongy backyard. And Porter pulled the kitchen shades, meanwhile lecturing Rose on how the white surfaces reflected the warmth back into the room now that the nights were cooler. Rose said, “Yes, Porter, I know all that,” and lifted the salad bowl to the light and examined it a moment before she put it away.

They watched the news, dutifully, and then they went out to the sun porch and sat at their grandparents’ card table. They played something called Vaccination – a card game they’d invented as children, which had grown so convoluted over the years that no one else had the patience to learn it. In fact, more than one outsider had accused them of altering the rules to suit the circumstances. “Now, just a minute,” Sarah had said, back when she’d still had hopes of figuring it out. “I thought you said aces were high.”

“They are.”

“So that means –”

“But not when they’re drawn from the deck.”

“Aha! Then why was the one that Rose drew counted high?”

“Well, she did draw it after a deuce, Sarah.”

“Aces drawn after a deuce are high?”

“No, aces drawn after a number that’s been drawn two times in a row just before that.”

Sarah had folded her fan of cards and laid them face down – the last of the wives to give up.

Macon was in quarantine and had to donate all his cards to Rose. Rose moved her chair over next to his and played off his points while he sat back, scratching the cat behind her ears. Opposite him, in the tiny dark windowpane, he saw their reflections – hollow-eyed and severely cheek-boned, more interesting versions of themselves.

The telephone in the living room gave a nipped squeak and then a full ring. Nobody seemed to notice. Rose laid a king on Porter’s queen and Porter said, “Stinker.” The telephone rang again and then again. In the middle of the fourth ring, it fell silent. “Hypodermic,” Rose told Porter, and she topped the king with an ace.

“You’re a real stinker, Rose.”

In the portrait on the end wall, the Leary children gazed out with their veiled eyes. It occurred to Macon that they were sitting in much the same positions here this evening: Charles and Porter on either side of him, Rose perched in the foreground. Was there any real change? He felt a jolt of something very close to panic. Here he still was! The same as ever! What have I gone and done? he wondered, and he swallowed thickly and looked at his own empty hands.