Word: macon
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When Sarah, Macon Leary's wife of twenty years, runs out of the house leaving her wedding rings in the soapdish, Macon's first instinct is to return to the childhood nest, the domestic asylum where his three sisters, all doomed for spinsterhood, still live. The tragedy which initiates their estrangement--the freak murder of the Leary's twelve year-old son, Ethan, that occurs while he is away at camp--lays bare the stasis their marriage has reached. When Sarah openly seeks comfort in her grief, Macon's only solace is the reminder that he, with his usual caution...
Still, the family hope is Macon, a Princeton graduate and best-selling author of a travel guide series called "The Acccidental Tourist." Tyler's wonderful irony describes how, in spite of the successful career he has built living out of hotels, Macon hates travel, especially to anywhere foreign. A true American tourist, he distrusts the exotic. Hungarian paprika makes him sneeze; his taste consistently tends toward American which, to his xenophobic mind, means the assurance of safety, the familiar: home...
...resemblance to those of the earlier work in terms of their ambivalence toward home. Tyler's sympathies highlight, in particular, the eccentric habits of white middle America: middle-class, middle-aged individuals suspended between "Tips From the Beauty Stars" security measures and childish rebellion. When the glib young Julian, Macon's editor, sails into Macon's sister Rose's life, setting her spinster sensibilities spinning with soap opera fantasies, the rest of the family is threatened by the stranger's intentions to make himself at home...
...While the yuppie suitor is ingenuous in his quest to become a permanent guest at the "real" old-fashioned dinners he envies, Tyler has no pretensions about the claustrophobia bred by such intimacy. Beneath the respectable bourgeois values lies a barrenness that has decayed even the excitement of sex. Macon's instinctive response to the dogtrainer Muriel's aggressive passes is the urge to confess that ever since the separation from his wife, "sex...has turned (like milk...
...family dinners inspires the idea to open The Homesick Restaurant, the Learys are sexless, neutral creatures whose homesick tendencies keep them permanently sheltered. Determined to save herself from a similarly myopic fate, Sarah bails out on a marriage run to entropy. The frustrated, impatient sister Penelope scornfully calls Macon "an armchair traveller," an Odysseus who can't even get up a sense of adventure...