book review the accidental tourist

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THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST

by Anne Tyler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 11, 1985

How do "impossible" couples evolve? In this most recent, luminous novel by Tyler, a "fairly chilly" man, muffled in loneliness, learns that a man and a woman can come together "for reasons the rest of the world would never guess." One can leave the principality of self to tour another's—to love "the surprise of her. . .the surprise of himself when he was with her." Macon Leary, married to Sarah, is an author of travel books for businessmen whose "concern was how to pretend they had never left home"—who want safe and comforting accommodations and food, who want to travel "without a jolt." Macon and Sarah, devastated by the senseless murder of their 12-year-old son in a fast-food shop holdup, are about to part. Sarah will leave this man that she claims remains "unchanged," who refuses to argue with the knowledge that the world is vile. Immobilized by a broken leg (was that accident an unconscious wish?), Macon will settle in with the family he started with—two brothers (one divorced) and sister Rose—in ultimate safety, where like plump, brooding fowl, the four deliberate in soothing converse, rearrange the straws of domesticity, Enter the "impossible" Muriel Pritchett, shrill as a macaw, single mother of a pale, wretched young boy, scrabbling for a living at various jobs, and existing messily on a cacophonous Baltimore street. Muriel has arrived at the Leary compound to whip into line Edward, Macon's pugnacious Welsh corgi who's fond of treeing bicyclists and family members. Muriel cows Edward while talking nonstop, and gradually Macon will find himself in "another country" of noise and color, where red slippers with feathers are necessary accessories to a woman in the morning. From a perspective where Macon feels he's a "vast distance from everyone who mattered" and a marriage where he and his wife seem to have "used each other up," Macon will find in foreignness his own "soft heart." Again in Tyler's tender, quiet prose, a delicate sounding of the odd and accidental incursions of the heart. Tone-perfect, and probably her best to date.

Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1985

ISBN: 0345452003

Page Count: 356

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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Review: The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

“People could, in fact, be used up -- could use each other up, could be of no further help to each other”

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Kate Tuttle reviews Anne Tyler’s most recent novel, “Clock Dance,” in this week’s issue. In 1985, Larry McMurtry expounded on Tyler’s skill and talent while writing about “The Accidental Tourist” for the Book Review. Read an excerpt below:

One of the persistent concerns of this work is the ambiguity of family happiness and unhappiness. In “The Accidental Tourist” these themes cohere with high definition in the muted personality of Macon Leary, a Baltimore man in his early 40’s who writes travel guides for businessmen who, like himself, hate to travel.

Not long after we meet him, Macon is left to himself. Sarah, his wife of 20 years, leaves him. Macon and Sarah have had a tragedy: their 12-year-old son, Ethan, was murdered in a fast-food joint, his death an accidental byproduct of a holdup. With the ballast of his marriage removed, Macon immediately tips into serious eccentricity.

Miss Tyler shows the mingling of misery and contentment in the daily lives of her families, reminds us how alike — and yet distinct — happy and unhappy families can be.

The concept of an accidental tourist captures in a phrase something she has been saying all along, if not about life, at least about men: they are frequently accidental tourists in their own lives. Her men slump arond like tired tourists — friendly, likable, but not all that engaged. If they see anything worth seeing, it is usually because a determined woman thrusts it under their noses and demands that they pay some attention. The fates of these families hinge on long struggles between semiattentive males and semiobsessed females. In her patient investigation of such struggles, Miss Tyler has produced a very satisfying body of fiction.

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Book Of A Lifetime: The Accidental Tourist, By Anne Tyler

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Asking a book lover to choose her book of a lifetime is a little like asking Casanova to pick his love of a lifetime; but if I have to, that book must be 'The Accidental Tourist' by Anne Tyler. A friend's mother recommended it to me back in the Eighties. We were sitting on the veranda while the slow sun set over the dark-blue North Sea and I was bemoaning the lack of "my kind of books". By this, I meant books that combined the best qualities of literary and commercial fiction the way the classics do; books where the writer's voice and view of the world delights and surprises, where the story and the characters seduce you along from page to page.

Mrs von Sydow handed me a copy of 'The Accidental Tourist' and I embarked on a lifelong love affair with the quietly stunning, quirky and oh-so humane writing of Anne Tyler. Like all Tyler's novels, 'The Accidental Tourist' combines comedy and tragedy without veering into farce or sentimentality. It's a novel that runs deep and showcases her ability to make the everyday both entirely recognisable and extraordinary.

Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates travel and the entire purpose of his guides is to make the traveller feel as if he had never left home. "Other travellers hoped to discover distinctive local wines; Macon's readers searched for pasteurized and homogenized milk." The novel starts on a sombre note. A year after their young son was killed, Macon's wife Sarah wants a divorce. But tragic is not the same as depressing, and Anne Tyler doesn't do depressing.

By chapter two I'm smiling at Macon's attempts to "systemize" his life now he was free of the woman who "stored her flatware intermingled". But when he falls and breaks his legs, he and Edward the dog are forced to move back with his three siblings who have all, one way or another, ended up back in the family home. The chapters spent in the company of the gentle, other-worldly, infuriating Leary siblings are some of my favourites. Edward, however, deals with his feelings of loss by biting strangers.

Macon calls on Muriel the dog trainer to help sort Edward out. Muriel, with her mass of dark hair, sharp face and eyes "like caraway seeds", is the devoted single mother to a small endearingly wheezy, pasty-faced son. Muriel never shuts up and doesn't know the meaning of the word "routine". Like Macon, I'm not sure that I approve of Muriel or her dog-training methods. But a relationship develops and Macon's frozen heart begins to thaw. When Sarah gets in touch and wants her husband back, he is not alone in being in two minds about what to do.

This novel, full of wisdom and writing that sneaks up on you with its brilliance, its insights, and its sheer humanity, gave me back my appetite for reading - while its author became an enduring professional role-model.

Marika Cobbold's new novel is 'Drowning Rose' (Bloomsbury)

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Accidental Tourist (Tyler)

The Accidental Tourist   Anne Tyler, 1985 Random House 352pp. ISBN-13: 9780345452009 Summary Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. He is grounded by loneliness and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts when he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who up-ends Macon’s insular world–and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life. ( From the publisher .)

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The Accidental Tourist: A Novel Kindle Edition

• Print length 418 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date December 18, 2007
• File size 3589 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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From library journal, from the inside flap, from the back cover, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0012E3J60
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (December 18, 2007)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 18, 2007
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 3589 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 418 pages
• #310 in Psychological Literary Fiction
• #1,393 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
• #1,608 in Psychological Fiction (Kindle Store)

About the author

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grownups, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Thread, Vinegar Girl and Clock Dance.

In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence; and in 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize.

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The Accidental Tourist: A Novel

By Anne Tyler

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Home » Et cetera » Articles & Extracts » Issue 26 » Redeemed by Muriel

Redeemed by Muriel

Frances Donnelly on Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

There are books I admire but don’t read again and books I reread compulsively. The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler falls into the latter category. It was only a recent seventh rereading that finally revealed why. It had taken me that long to hold the sum of this extraordinary novel in my head – to realize that this was a great and subtle piece of writing where every character, every phrase was a carefully chosen part of a magnificent and subtle whole. It is also, even after multiple readings, extremely funny.

Essentially this is a love story but one which offers a surprising view of what love may be. Anne Tyler’s characters inhabit her native Baltimore but in a parallel universe – they are people on the margins, often eccentric, people who are just trying to get by, seemingly untouched by external social and political events. The central character is Macon Leary who has suffered a catastrophic loss: his 12-year-old son has been killed in a random shooting. His marriage collapses and he’s left alone in the marital home. But Macon is revealed as a man who lives in perpetual apprehension of the outside world – his son’s death has simply confirmed his worst suspicions that the world is messy, uncontrolled and meaningless, and that goes for its inhabitants as well.

The early chapters describe his increasingly frenzied attempts to get his household ‘under control’: sheet bags instead of pyjamas, skate boards under linen baskets to speed up laundry procedures. He struggles on with his work, which is writing travel guides of an unusual nature. The mission of the Accidental Tourist guides could be summed up as ‘making travelling businessmen feel they haven’t left home’ – a beautiful metaphor for Macon’s own terror of anywhere unfamiliar. ‘I am happy to say that it is now possible to buy Kentucky Fried Ch

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Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 26 © Frances Donnelly 2010

About the contributor

Frances Donnelly lives in Suffolk and would like to offer special thanks to Sally Hunkin whose copy of this book she read seven times and inadvertently destroyed.

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Add your guide, you are here:, the accidental tourist.

They were supposed to stay at the beach a week, but neither of them had the heart for it and they decided to come back early. Macon drove. Sarah sat next to him, leaning her head against the side window. Chips of cloudy sky showed through her tangled brown curls.

Macon wore a formal summer suit, his traveling suit --- much more logical for traveling than jeans, he always said. Jeans had those stiff, hard seams and those rivets. Sarah wore a strapless terry beach dress. They might have been returning from two entirely different trips. Sarah had a tan but Macon didn't. He was a tall, pale, gray-eyed man, with straight fair hair cut close to his head, and his skin was that thin kind that easily burns. He'd kept away from the sun during the middle part of every day.

Just past the start of the divided highway, the sky grew almost black and several enormous drops spattered the windshield. Sarah sat up straight. "Let's hope it doesn't rain," she said.

"I don't mind a little rain," Macon said.

Sarah sat back again, but she kept her eyes on the road.

It was a Thursday morning. There wasn't much traffic. They passed a pickup truck, then a van all covered with stickers from a hundred scenic attractions. The drops on the windshield grew closer together. Macon switched his wipers on. Tick-swoosh, they went --- a lulling sound; and there was a gentle patter on the roof. Every now and then a gust of wind blew up. Rain flattened the long, pale grass at the sides of the road. It slanted across the boat lots, lumberyards, and discount furniture outlets, which already had a darkened look as if here it might have been raining for some time.

"Can you see all right?" Sarah asked.

"Of course," Macon said. "This is nothing."

They arrived behind a trailer truck whose rear wheels sent out arcs of spray. Macon swung to the left and passed. There was a moment of watery blindness till the truck had dropped behind. Sarah gripped the dashboard with one hand.

"I don't know how you can see to drive," she said.

"Maybe you should put on your glasses."

"Putting on my glasses would help you to see?"

"Not me; you," Macon said. "You're focused on the windshield instead of the road."

Sarah continued to grip the dashboard. She had a broad, smooth face that gave an impression of calm, but if you looked closely you'd notice the tension at the corners of her eyes.

The car drew in around them like a room. Their breaths fogged the windows. Earlier the air conditioner had been running and now some artificial chill remained, quickly turning dank, carrying with it the smell of mildew. They shot through an underpass. The rain stopped completely for one blank, startling second. Sarah gave a little gasp of relief, but even before it was uttered, the hammering on the roof resumed. She turned and gazed back longingly at the underpass. Macon sped ahead, with his hands relaxed on the wheel.

"Did you notice that boy with the motorcycle?" Sarah asked. She had to raise her voice; a steady, insistent roaring sound engulfed them.

"What boy?"

"He was parked beneath the underpass."

"It's crazy to ride a motorcycle on a day like today," Macon said. "Crazy to ride one any day. You're so exposed to the elements."

"We could do that," Sarah said. "Stop and wait it out."

"Sarah, if I felt we were in the slightest danger I'd have pulled over long ago."

"Well, I don't know that you would have," Sarah said.

They passed a field where the rain seemed to fall in sheets, layers and layers of rain beating down the cornstalks, flooding the rutted soil. Great lashings of water flung themselves at the windshield. Macon switched his wiper blades to high.

"I don't know that you really care that much," Sarah said. "Do you?"

Macon said, "Care?"

"I said to you the other day, I said, ‘Macon, now that Ethan's dead I sometimes wonder if there's any point to life.' Do you remember what you answered?"

"Well, not offhand," Macon said.

"You said, ‘Honey, to tell the truth, it never seemed to me there was all that much point to begin with.' Those were your exact words."

"Um . . ."

"And you don't even know what was wrong with that."

"No, I guess I don't," Macon said.

He passed a line of cars that had parked at the side of the road, their windows opaque, their gleaming surfaces bouncing back the rain in shallow explosions. One car was slightly tipped, as if about to fall into the muddy torrent that churned and raced in the gully. Macon kept a steady speed.

"You're not a comfort, Macon," Sarah said.

"Honey, I'm trying to be."

"You just go on your same old way like before. Your little routines and rituals, depressing habits, day after day. No comfort at all."

"Shouldn't I need comfort too?" Macon asked. "You're not the only one, Sarah. I don't know why you feel it's your loss alone."

"Well, I just do, sometimes," Sarah said.

They were quiet a moment. A wide lake, it seemed, in the center of the highway crashed against the underside of the car and slammed it to the right. Macon pumped his brakes and drove on.

"This rain, for instance," Sarah said. "You know it makes me nervous. What harm would it do to wait it out? You'd be showing some concern. You'd be telling me we're in this together."

Macon peered through the windshield, which was streaming so that it seemed marbled. He said, "I've got a system, Sarah. You know I drive according to a system."

"You and your systems!"

"Also," he said, "if you don't see any point to life, I can't figure why a rainstorm would make you nervous."

Sarah slumped in her seat.

"Will you look at that!" he said. "A mobile home's washed clear across that trailer park."

"Macon, I want a divorce," Sarah told him.

Macon braked and glanced over at her. "What?" he said. The car swerved. He had to face forward again. "What did I say?" he asked. "What did it mean?"

"I just can't live with you anymore," Sarah said.

Macon went on watching the road, but his nose seemed sharper and whiter, as if the skin of his face had been pulled tight. He cleared his throat. He said, "Honey. Listen. It's been a hard year. We've had a hard time. People who lose a child often feel this way; everybody says so; everybody says it's a terrible strain on a marriage ---"

"I'd like to find a place of my own as soon as we get back," Sarah told him.

"Place of your own," Macon echoed, but he spoke so softly, and the rain beat so loudly on the roof, it looked as if he were only moving his lips. "Well," he said. "All right. If that's what you really want."

"You can keep the house," Sarah said. "You never did like moving."

For some reason, it was this that made her finally break down. She turned away sharply. Macon switched his right blinker on. He pulled into a Texaco station, parked beneath the overhang, and cut off the engine. Then he started rubbing his knees with his palms. Sarah huddled in her corner. The only sound was the drumming of rain on the overhang far above them.

Excerpted from  The Accidental Tourist  © Copyright 2012 by Anne Tyler. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.

The Accidental Tourist by by Anne Tyler

• paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• ISBN-10: 0345452003
• ISBN-13: 9780345452009
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The Accidental Tourist

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Generous with its characters' foibles and virtues, The Accidental Tourist is a thoughtful drama vested with insight into the complications of relationships.

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Lawrence Kasdan

William Hurt

Macon Leary

Kathleen Turner

Sarah Leary

Geena Davis

Muriel Pritchett

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Thoughts on the creative process by arhuelsenbeck, review of the accidental tourist, or why i’d rather read the book than see the movie.

I discovered the novelist Anne Tyler in the early 1990s. The movie The Accidental Tourist had come and gone, and I’d never seen it. One day while browsing in my neighborhood bookstore , I found a $2.50 pre-read paperback copy and decided to see what all the fuss was about.

Macon Leary’s wife had left him after the death of their only son, and Macon wasn’t coping very well. In fact, his behavior could only be described as bizarre. He began optimizing his life by systematically rethinking and reorganizing his routines, like keeping a popcorn popper and an electric percolator connected to a timer on the bedroom windowsill, so he could awaken to the aromas of coffee and popcorn, his new standard breakfast menu. He also washed his clothes daily (with his feet) while taking his shower. And so he could sleep in fresh sheets every night without the pesky task of making the bed, he sewed the sheets into envelopes that could just be placed atop the mattress.

And read another Tyler novel, and another, and another–maybe a dozen in all. She was my favorite author for a decade.

Recently, I searched my house for fresh fiction, and it seemed I didn’t have a single unread novel, though nonfiction is stacked in To-Be-Read towers. Then I remembered how much I had once loved Anne Tyler, and decided I would read her books in sequence.

I determined that the earliest Tyler book I own is The Clock Winder . I don’t remember ever reading it, and starting it now, I just couldn’t get into it. It has a very slow opening that didn’t capture my attention. So, I abandoned that idea and reread The Accidental Tourist , because I remembered that it started my obsession with her.

In a few minutes, I was immersed in Macon’s world.

The author of a series of city guidebooks for business travelers, Macon is especially suited for his job of finding options that would make reluctant jet-setters feel as though they weren’t far from home.

Not long after his wife, Sarah, abandons him, he breaks his leg (in an accident precipitated by his deceased son’s dog, Edward), forcing him to move into the family home that his two brothers and his sister still occupy.

Edward is also not handling Ethan’s (the son’s) death well. His behavior is becoming increasingly aggressive. Macon’s siblings pressure him to get rid of the dog, but he can’t—it would be like losing the last part of Ethan. So he calls Muriel, a dog trainer he met when boarding Edward at the Meow-Bow.

Muriel has problems of her own. She’s single, raising a son with multiple health problems. She’s barely getting by, despite shopping at thrift stores and working several jobs. And she falls head over heels for Macon.

While preparing this review, I happened upon this clip from the movie on YouTube, one of the earliest interactions between Macon and Muriel:

I still haven’t seen the movie, and now I really don’t want to. It seems super dated, with weak acting. In 1989, Geena Davis won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for this role. Why? The Muriel in my head is much dumpier than Geena Davis, and shorter. And has a shrill voice with an East Coast accent. Geena Davis doesn’t even come close. And William Hurt is way more together than the Macon in my head.

Sometimes watching the movie of a book you already love is a satisfying experience. Like the Harry Potter and the Hunger Games movies. (Am I giving away that YA fantasy and dystopia are my favorite genres?) Disclaimer : I am not saying the movies are as good as the books; I’m only saying they are satisfying . But a movie cannot duplicate the depth of the written form. A movie generally has a two-hour time limit. In my opinion, you can’t reproduce the detail of a 342-page book in a two-hour film.

When you read a book, especially if you are reading it in short snatches over the course of several days or weeks, you spend time in that world. You mull over what’s happening. You live with the characters. You get to know them as if they were your friends, or at least co-workers or neighbors. And, usually, the book is much better than the movie.

In the early chapters of The Accidental Tourist, I hated Sarah for dumping Macon. They should have gone for counseling or something. Their marriage could have been put back together.

When Muriel enters Macon’s life, he resists her with all his power, but she is relentless in her pursuit. I began to notice her vulnerability behind her pushiness, her genuine love for her son Alexander, and the sweetness behind her desperation. I began to root for her.

Subplots in the story revolve around the dysfunctionality of the rest of the Leary family. Nevertheless, the sister, Rose, is wooed by Macon’s boss—but their newly-married life deviates from Julian’s expectations.

I’m not going to spoil the ending for you. I’ll just say that for the first time in his life, Macon makes a decision based on what he wants, rather than what those around him expect.

The Accidental Tourist came out in 1985, but it’s still relevant, even without any of the technological references that make their way into modern fiction. (Did you notice the old-fashioned credit card transaction in the clip?) If you can get past the discomfort of its quirkiness, you’re in for an engaging read.

Have you read  The Accidental Tourist?  Do you like Anne Tyler’s novels? Which is your favorite? In general, do you like books or their movie versions better? Share in the comments below.

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One response »

Great review! (And I don’t think it is allowing me to “like” as I was saying in the other blog comment! Keeps making me fill out all my info again and doesnt seem to save the “like”… My fault somehow, I think!) I remember wanting to see this movie, and I think I had the book at some point and maybe started it? Definitely never finished it. I will give it a try again. (And then will watch the movie, too. I love Geena Davis AND William Hurt!) Thanks!

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Theater | Review: ‘The Kite Runner’ at CIBC Theatre has a…

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Theater | review: ‘the kite runner’ at cibc theatre has a compelling story that struggles to fly on stage.

That legacy, at once local to Evanston and international of import, came into my head Wednesday night as I watched the touring production of “The Kite Runner,” a show I’d previously reviewed on Broadway in 2022. It’s a (non-musical) adaptation of the justly celebrated debut novel by the Afghan American writer Khaled Hosseini, a harrowing story of displacement and betrayal set in Kabul, Afghanistan, Pakistan and San Francisco. Hosseini had a lot to say about the fate of Afghanistan at the hands of the Soviets, the Americans and the Taliban, but the core of the book really is about how the Pashtun narrator, Amir, fails to prevent a sexual assault happening to his loyal and vulnerable Hazara friend Hassan, and how the narrator’s compounding guilt then comes to define much of the rest of his life.

“The Kite Runner” is a powerful work, widely assigned in schools and famous following the 2007 film of the same name, but I find Matthew Spangler’s adaptation disappointing mostly because huge chunks of the storytelling are confined to the narrative voice, and because so little of the potential visual sweep of a story that draws on the ecstatic experience of flying a kite made it onto the stage. The touring show, which has a smaller physical production than was the case on Broadway, benefits greatly from an accomplished lead actor in Ramzi Khalaf, who carries the bulk of the storytelling, as well as two lovely performances from Shahzeb Zahid Hussain as Hassan and Haythem Noor as Baba, Amir’s demanding but loving father. Hussain especially is really something.

It’s true that Amir’s attempts to assuage his guilt, even though he was hardly the most to blame, are central to the work and this is both a father-son story and one of redemption. And, of course, Amir is the main authorial representative.  But the use of that single narrative voice squeezes out the character who suffers most, which is Hassan, and as you watch this adaptation you constantly think how Hassan has been rendered almost like a cypher for another’s guilt and Amir’s point of view actually is not the one that matters the most here.

There’s nothing inherent wrong with a flawed narrator, of course, but the dialog-phobic adaptation, and to some degree the staging by director Giles Croft, tends to foregound it at the expense of everyone else. The production also lacks sensorial ambition; when a great novel is turned into a Broadway show, we expect a rush of what the theater does best, a sense of place and milieu, beautiful stage pictures, a racing theatrical pulse, a sense of additive life to what once just sat on the page.

This journeyman, sometimes pedestrian, version of “The Kite Runner” doesn’t have that level of ambition, despite its Broadway pedigree.  Granted, it has its moments:  I liked the touring cast very much indeed and I think the show is a good idea for a young person studying the book, for it will set the mind and heart racing when it comes to what (for me) is its central themes: the morality, or lack thereof, of self-protection if personal survival so demands and how individuals can and should love even when surrounded by oppression.

But it could have been so much more if only it had let others reveal more of their hearts.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

[email protected]

Review: “The Kite Runner” (2.5 stars)

When: Through June 23

Where: CIBC theatre, 18 W. Monroe St.

Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes

Tickets: $31.50-$115.50 at www.broadwayinchicago.com

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Best new crime: Novels from Oliver Harris, Scarlett Thomas, Lucy Foley, Andrea Mara and Hugo Rifkind

Fictional summer feasts set against cyber warfare and leaks, greek island tragedy, a dorset country retreat, foxrock domestic noir, and the world of guns and scotland’s shabby rich.

Andrea Mara: Someone in the Attic is her most accomplished novel to date. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw

The spy and the private eye are two sides of the same literary coin, so it makes sense that Elliott Kane, an ex-MI6 veteran, might set himself up as a “private spy”. The Shame Archive (Abacus, £16.99), Oliver Harris’s third Elliott Kane novel, opens with Rebecca Sinclair receiving an anonymous message that threatens to expose the truth of the licentious life she lived before she married Robert Sinclair, a high-profile Conservative MP and – all going well – a future prime minister.

At roughly the same time, the deeply cynical Kane discovers that the MI6 archives have been breached and all of their juicy details are for sale on the dark web. But what first appears to be a rather amateurish attempt at extortion and historical score-settling very quickly escalates to threaten the very foundations of British democracy.

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If Mick Herron is this generation’s John le Carré, then Oliver Harris has a decent claim to be our Len Deighton: Elliott Kane is a no-nonsense anti-hero living “a stupid, morally blank life” as he operates in the crevices where professional spooks interact with international finance of dubious provenance. But even Kane can’t turn his back on his former joes, whose identities are revealed when “the shame archive” is ransacked for its secrets, and whose lives are now at risk of termination by Unit 22195, aka “Putin’s personal assassination squad”. Harris’s deceptively understated style powers a relentless thriller that deep-dives into the digital battlefields where future wars will be fought.

A honeymoon on a Greek island promises an idyllic experience in Scarlett Thomas’s The Sleepwalkers (Scribner, £14.99), but Evelyn and Richard aren’t exactly love’s young dream when they arrive at the Villa Rose after their “cursed” wedding, and matters are further complicated by their idiosyncratic host, Isabella, who seems hell-bent on antagonising Evelyn.

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Scarlett Thomas’s taut, bone-dry style, and her vivid evocations of a Greek tourist destination running to seed, ensure her narrative experiments are gorgeously readable

Worse, Evelyn and Richard have walked into the aftermath of a tragedy in which a married couple drowned while sleepwalking – or so the locals claim. What really happened to the sleepwalkers, and what might well happen to Evelyn and Richard, forms the narrative spine of a novel that simultaneously functions as a deconstruction of a novel: delivered for the most part in the epistolary form, it also features an American film producer who – tellingly – “believes movies nowadays are much more about synecdoche and metonymy, you know, like the adjacent stories”.

Sounds tricksy, but Scarlett Thomas’s taut, bone-dry style, and her vivid evocations of a Greek tourist destination running to seed, ensure that her narrative experiments are gorgeously readable.

Set on the Dorset coast as the “country Eden” destination The Manor opens its doors for the first time, Lucy Foley’s The Midnight Feast (HarperCollins, £18.99) revolves around Bella, a woman who “looks like London and money” but, as she tells herself, is “constructing a new persona around my rented wardrobe”.

Why Bella has come to The Manor in disguise, and the truth of her relationship with its owner, the “Goopy yoga princess” Francesca, leads us into a complex web of lies, betrayals and murder rooted in a summer holiday some 15 years ago. It’s a promising set-up, but one that is frequently undermined by the main characters’ bizarre habit of reminding themselves of their backstories (”When I first learned The Manor was looking for an architect,” Francesca’s husband Owen tells himself during an interior monologue, “I knew there was no way I could do it. I’d barely worked in the UK full stop. Recent builds included an Icelandic actor’s holiday home in the western fjords, a hotel in Costa Rica …”)

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An odd habit, on the face of it, but maybe Owen & Co feel the need to root themselves firmly in a multilayered tale of duplicity, ostentatious luxury, class warfare and warped folklore told by a bevy of characters with dark secrets they’re desperate to conceal.

Recently arrived back in Dublin from San Diego as Andrea Mara’s Someone in the Attic (Bantam, £14.99) begins, Julia, her ex-husband Gabe and their kids Isla and Luca have moved into a new-build gated community in Foxrock. It sounds like an ideal homecoming, but there’s a wrinkle or two. First, teenager Isla finds videos on social media of a masked man emerging from their attic to explore their home, and then Anya, Julia’s teenage friend, is discovered drowned in her bath.

By now the reader knows that Anya’s death wasn’t accidental, and that she was drowned by a masked man who climbed down out of her attic; will Julia and her family be the next victims of a killer who appears to be taking his cues from the wildly popular TV show The Loft? Andrea Mara establishes a simmering tension from the off and then proceeds, like a sadistically refined maestro of Chinese water torture, to very gradually increase the temperature via a whole shoal of red herrings and a series of vertiginous cliffhangers.

An inventive, unsettling take on domestic noir, one in which the past is constantly trembling on the verge of erupting into Julia’s increasingly frantic attempts to keep her children safe within the suddenly claustrophobic confines of her “nice, safe, luxury gated complex”, Someone in the Attic is Andrea Mara’s most accomplished novel to date.

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“When the shotgun went off under Johnnie Burchill’s brother’s chin, word had it, the top of his head came off like a turnip lantern.” So begins Hugo Rifkind’s Rabbits (Polygon, £14.99), a novel that opens in 1996 in a milieu described by our teenage narrator, Tommo Dwarkin, as “niche posh Edinburgh madness”. Tommo, alas, is merely a middle-class interloper in a world of Scotland’s rundown castles, flamboyant kilts and the shabby rich; it’s a world, he learns at his first pheasant shoot, where “guns are people and people are guns”.

Probably the world’s least ambitious social-climber, Tommo pursues the glamorous Flora McPhail without ever really understanding how out of his depth he truly is

Tommo’s entry into this world comes courtesy of Johnnie Burchill, who is “only tenuously bound by the usual rules”; and when Johnnie comes to suspect that his older brother’s death by shotgun wasn’t necessarily an accident, as the police reported, but a murder rooted in the complicated inheritance laws that underpin what passes for the modern Scottish aristocracy, all bets are off.

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Tommo makes for delightful company as he navigates this alluring, alien world. Probably the world’s least ambitious social-climber, Tommo pursues the glamorous Flora McPhail without ever really understanding how out of his depth he truly is in “the whole Scottish shooting, fishing thing”. What he does appreciate, however, is that the boarding school ethos, with its celebration of its glorious dead and sacrifices made on foreign fields, creates a mentality in which young men accept that violent death is par for the course: “Not so much that they’d died for us; more that they were us, exactly us, gone before.”

Told in a breezy, irreverent style that plumbs black comedy to reveal its tragedy, Rabbits feels like a blend of Brideshead Revisited and Less Than Zero reworked by Chris Brookmyre.

Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)

Declan Burke

Declan Burke, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a novelist and critic

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