Word: macon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken, held monogamy to be comfortable, laudable and sanitary. This is the sort of no-frills domesticity that would appeal to Macon Leary, also from "Bawl-mer" and the main attraction of Anne Tyler's tenth novel. After his wife leaves him, Leary reduces homemaking to an antic science. A percolator and an electric corn popper hooked up to a clock radio allow him to wake up to brewed coffee and popped corn. Bed making is eliminated by stitching a sleeping bag from a sheet. To save time and kilowatts, the laundry is thrown into...
Readers of Anne Tyler novels have come to expect eccentric homebodies (Morgan Gower of Morgan's Passing, Ezra Tull of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant), but none combined oddities as well as Macon Leary. His occupation, for example, is matchless. Would you believe a travel writer for people who hate to travel? His guidebooks, published under the general heading "The Accidental Tourist," answer such questions as "What restaurants in Tokyo offered Sweet'n'Low? Did Amsterdam have a McDonald's? Did Mexico City have a Taco Bell? Did any place in Rome serve Chef Boyardee ravioli?" Like his unadventurous readers...
Such gentle humor is set against a backdrop of tragedy. The year before Macon and Wife Sarah separate, their twelve-year-old son Ethan is among bystanders systematically shot and killed by hold-up men at a fast-food outlet. Baldly stated, the irony seems a tasteless contrivance: Son of Junk-Food Expert Slain ) at Burger Bonanza. But like Evelyn Waugh in A Handful of Dust and John Irving in The World According to Garp, Tyler uses the senseless loss of a child to refine feelings out of a parent's worst fears...
...Unruly and nippy, the dog requires the services of Muriel, an obedience trainer at Meow-Bow kennel. She is an untypical breed in "truncated black suede boots with witchy toes and needle heels," a streetwise stray looking for a home. The Maryland working girl eventually gets a leash around Macon, who wants his wife back but breaks a leg and has to move in with his brothers and sister. The Learys are a close family of bottle-cap manufacturers who play a private card game called Vaccination and can boast of an inventor grandfather who had high hopes...
...Macon is the most engaging member of this sweetly perverse clan. He may be master of the minimal, but he is inept in the face of vitality. Edward keeps him hopping. His boss insists on launching him in search of the latest in bland and drab. An admirably persistent Muriel steers him into her life, which includes a sickly son. Despite incompatible styles, the arrangement works: Muriel tames the dog, and Macon invigorates...