Word: macon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
More often, as Tyler adroitly stages events, Macon finds himself in a screwball farce. His leg fracture occurs when his cat gets stuck in a clothes dryer; his excited dog jumps on him, and he falls down the basement stairs while going to the rescue. A waitress insists that he check his crutches. Leaving the restaurant, he feels unexplainably crippled, "nearly doubled, his chin sunk low on his chest and his elbows jutting out awkwardly like the wings of a baby bird." It seems appropriate that he should look the way he feels, until an old woman points out that...
...Accidental Tourist brings Tyler up to date: girl leaves boy, boy keeps house. Macon Leary's unassertiveness is in timely contrast to Sarah's decisiveness and Muriel's zeal. Ethan's violent death is right off the 6 o'clock news. Even Macon finally proves conspicuously contemporary by taking charge of his life. The move seems a bit too abrupt for a character whose susceptibility to drift has been so carefully established. But this is a minor disappointment in a novel animated by witty invention and lively personalities, including Edward the feisty corgi, whose bite is just...