A Well-Meaning Misfit

By Paul Gray

Anne Tyler is one of the few contemporary authors whose work consistently attracts both critical acclaim and scads of paying readers. Those curious about how this trick is performed--a category that must include nearly every other writer on earth--would do well to consult A Patchwork Planet (Knopf; 288 pages; $24), Tyler's 14th novel. This new book not only conforms to the familiar pattern the author has established in her fiction but does so in a fresh and engaging fashion.

The central character in a typical Tyler novel is a well-meaning but somehow ineffectual hero or heroine, a misfit who wonders how everyone else manages to cope. This time out, it's Barnaby Gaitlin, who turns 30 during the course of this story without having acquired any noticeable trappings of success. "A rented room," his ex-wife Natalie chides him, "an unskilled job, a bunch of shiftless friends. No goals and no ambitions."

All true, he concedes, and there is worse. Barnaby is the scion of a distinguished Baltimore, Md., family; his great-grandfather made enough money to establish the Gaitlin Foundation for the Indigent, now headed by Barnaby's father. But the son's career as a teenage vandal strained relations with his family. "Back in the days when I was a juvenile delinquent," Barnaby confides, "I used to break into houses and read people's private mail. Also photo albums. I had a real thing about photo albums."

And what does the adult Barnaby do for a living? Why, he goes into people's houses as an 11-year employee of Rent-a-Back, a Baltimore firm that performs, for a fee, household chores that are impossible for the elderly or infirm. And sure enough, one of his clients eventually accuses him of stealing $2,960 in cash stashed in a flour bin.

Since Barnaby by this time has established his credentials as a candid narrator of his own flaws, readers need not be worried that he has sneakily reverted to the ways of his youth. Tyler has made it impossible not to care, quite intently, about his rightful exoneration.

Which is never, it must be added, seriously in doubt. The plot of A Patchwork Planet provides little suspense but--Tyler's trademark--many occasions for touching human details. The best of them involve Barnaby's sympathetic observations about the aging people who depend on his services. "I never counted my clients as friends--not even the ones I liked," he says. "Clients could up and die on you." So they do, and Barnaby mourns them. One of his favorites, Mrs. Alford, goes suddenly, and relatives show Barnaby the quilt with a Planet Earth design that she had hastily finished. He sees a depiction "clumsily cobbled together, overlapping and crowded and likely to fall into pieces at any moment." That is a pretty good description of the world in Tyler's fiction, a fragile place sustained by hope and love.

--By Paul Gray