Anne Tyler's novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. It was OK...but I've read other Anne Tyler novels that I thought were a lot better than this one. Her strength is writing characters who are quirky and flawed and completely human. No one's perfect and it's the oddities in people that she writes with such empathy. I think I was originally put off by the disorganized way the book seemed to be written. It's like she wrote a bunch of stuff in whatever order it occurred to her and then pasted it together. On reflection, however, I think maybe she did it that way on purpose. The other strange part for me was that I imagined the characters as much older than they actually were. The way they were behaving, it made me think of them as being in their 50s, but they were really in their upper 30s. I kept having to do mental double takes.
The main character, Macon, is an OCD fellow who writes travel guides for people who don't like to travel. His life is supremely structured and logical until his son is killed in a robbery related shooting. Then his wife leaves him, he sort of goes OCD overboard, breaks his leg, and moves back in with his like-minded brothers and sister. The twist is the unpredictable, flighty dog trainer he has to hire to prevent his dog from attacking people. As you may guess, Macon develops a relationship with the dog trainer. In the end, he has to make a choice to go back to his wife or stay with the new woman.
I liked the book. It's an easy read and entertaining. I just don't know if I would have considered it award-winning. Ironically, there's a Q&A at the end of the book and the interviewer asks Anne Tyler what she's reading now. She responds that she's just fallen in love with Ann Patchett's Bel Canto! :)
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