The Accidental Tourist (1985), Anne Tyler’s 10th novel, won the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for the most distinguished work of American fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It was made into a Warner Brothers feature-length film starring William Hurt as protagonist Macon Leary, Kathleen Turner as his wife, Sarah, and Geena Davis as his lover, Muriel Pritchett.
Like the majority of Tyler’s work, The Accidental Tourist is a domestic novel set in Baltimore and focusing on family tragedy and conflict. In coping with the violent and random death of their son Ethan, the tensions between Macon Leary and Sarah rise to the surface: she is warm, loving, and emotional; he is dispassionate, conventional, and undemonstrative. By the end of Chapter 1, Sarah has left her husband of 20 years, determined to obtain a divorce.
Alice Hall Petry has noted similarities between Tyler’s work and that of Nathaniel Hawthorne, pointing out that the works of both writers demonstrate the often paralyzing and immobilizing nature of the past (Petry, 8). One year after Ethan’s senseless death, Macon Leary functions, but only in an almost mechanical way, and Sarah’s departure devastates him. Tyler’s psychological portrait of Macon is thoroughly convincing, detailed, and alternately comic and sympathetic.
He is “leery” of an existence that has robbed him of both son and wife. Overcome by loneliness, Macon behaves in neurotic and obsessive ways, closeting himself in his house and adopting a rigid and unvarying schedule. He shops for groceries only on Tuesdays; he wears sweat suits to avoid making choices and ensuring he will have no daytime clothes or pajamas to launder.
Finally, after he breaks his leg, Macon moves in with his unmarried sister Rose and his two divorced brothers, Porter and Charles. The four aging “children” live together in their grandparents’ house, barricaded against the rest of the world, compulsively labeling their groceries alphabetically and playing “Vaccination,” their own complicated card game that metaphorically inoculates them against the hardship and sorrow beyond their walls (Petry, 215).
Perhaps fortunately for Macon, he has the responsibility for Ethan’s dog Edward. The dog’s temperamental behavior reflects Macon’s own, and Macon decides to seek professional help for him. The compassionate dog trainer’s name is Muriel; she also appeals to Macon, and within a very short time he moves into her home and becomes a “surrogate father” to Muriel’s son Alexander, instilling in him a sense of self-confidence that Macon himself lacks at this point (Bail).
Macon, who has made a living by writing tourism guidebooks for travelers who do not like to venture beyond the safe zone of home and neighborhood, is devastated by his new insights into the human condition. Yet he overcomes his fear of traveling in order to acquire material for his books. Tyler is suggesting that he has come some distance on his own journey.
Unlike his brothers who have chosen to work in the secure but stultifying family business, a factory that manufactures obsolete cork-lined bottle caps, Macon’s travels signal his latent ability to evoke and accept change. Moreover, he learns from the unconventional Muriel, a free spirit and a madcap as well as a woman of unmistakably strong will, that behavior modification is possible. Edward the dog learns the same lesson.
The novel ends in Paris, not Baltimore, where Macon is traveling on business. When he is unexpectedly joined by both his wife Sarah and his lover Muriel, Macon realizes that he must choose one of the two women. He knows that he will always feel romantic love for Sarah, but enjoys the spirit of adventure and feeling of joie de vivre that Muriel engenders in him.
Macon, a man who, at his worst, is fastidious, pedantic, and hypochondriacal, has learned to be merry and tolerant and adventurous. As in most of Anne Tyler’s novels, the journey has taught him that he does not have the power to eliminate his past or to deny life’s pain; however, he can make choices in his life and his traveling companion, and live with the most happiness possible under the circumstances, even if he is helpless to eliminate the residue of a painful past.
Sources
Bail, Paul. Anne Tyler. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Evans, Elizabeth. Anne Tyler. New York: Twayne, 1993.
Gilbert, Susan. “Private Lives and Public Issues: Anne Tyler’s Prize-Winning Novels.” In The Fiction of Anne Tyler, edited by C. Ralph Stephens, 136–145. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.
Petry, Alice Hall. Understanding Anne Tyler. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.
Stephens, C. Ralph, ed. The Fiction of Anne Tyler. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.
Tyler, Anne. The Accidental Tourist. New York: Berkley Books, 1986.
Voelker, Joseph C. Art and the Accidental in Anne Tyler. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989.
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