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For years, Anne Tyler has been one of my few exceptions to the "I'll buy it in
paperback" rule. Her characters leap off the pages and into my heart and mind. When I
finished THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST, I went on a Tyler reading binge. I've waited impatiently
for each novel since. Some, inevitably, were destined to become favorites. A PATCHWORK
PLANET currently tops this list.
In A PATCHWORK PLANET, Tyler returns to what she does best --- writing about the common
lives of average people in a way that penetrates the ordinary to reveal the extraordinary.
This is Barnaby Gaitlin's story. Barnaby, in his own words, is a "man you can
trust." As the black sheep of an established and philanthropic Baltimore family, he
lives on the margins. As teenagers, Barnaby and his friends went on thieving missions in
their privileged neighborhoods. Barnaby, though, was far less interested in stealing
people's property than using the window into their lives that breaking and entering and
looking through their belongings presented to him. Barnaby was the one who got caught in
the neighbors' bushes holding their valuable property, and he was sent off to the
Renascence School, a special school for "the gifted young tester of
limits."
When he got out of Renascence, he went to work for "Rent-A-Back," a business
that sends strong young people to help folks put their Christmas trees up, move furniture,
bring in the groceries, take out the trash --- whatever they need to continue to live
independently. The work takes Barnaby into the homes and lives of people who have no
reason not to trust him and build relationships with him. He likes the work because it
puts him into their lives, allowing him to continue the voyeurism from his teens that has
left him mostly on the outside of others' lives, looking in. And he likes these people,
with their flaws and quirks, because they appreciate him, even with his flaws ---
something most of his family is unable to do.
The Gaitlin family runs a charitable foundation, dispensing compassionate assistance to
those in need yet unable to dispense forgiveness or understanding to their rogue son.
Barnaby goes home for family gatherings, but he rarely finds happiness or acceptance
there. His mother never loses an opportunity to remind him what he has cost the family in
not only shame and heartache, but in the cold, hard cash it took to hush up his youthful
misdeeds. The family sees only the commonness of his work, never understanding that he
lives out the kind of compassion on a daily basis that they only experience from a
benevolent, check-writing distance.
Grandfather Gaitlin began the foundation based on a message from an angel. Each Gaitlin
since has waited for his angel to bring him a message for his life. While Barnaby waits
and looks, he continues to rent out his back and offer his compassion to strangers, while
trying to piece together relationships with his distant daughter, his parents, brother,
and Sophia, who might or might not be his angel. She becomes his girlfriend, moving her
Crock Pot into his world and giving him a sense of what passes with other people for
"normal" life.
"Sophia" is Greek for "wisdom," and this Sophia appears to be the one
who can help Barnaby put the pieces together. But Barnaby's life lessons are not like the
pieces of the patchwork quilt of earth that one of his client is making. They must be
learned in their own way. As he moves through the lives, heartaches, celebrations, and
deaths of those around him, he opens their eyes and hearts to the presence of grace in the
world. It is this grace that pieces all of us together --- "makeshift and haphazard,
clumsily cobbled together, overlapping and crowded and likely to fall to pieces at any
moment."
Tyler moves the story with her own kind of grace, sharing this world, in its intricate and
loving detail, with breath-taking prose. The three years since the publication of her last
novel has been worth the wait.
--- Reviewed by Jeanny V. House
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