‘Three Days in June’ by Anne Tyler       (2025) – 176 pages

Anne Tyler is one of the main writers who got me attracted to fiction in the first place back in the early 1970s. After I read a couple of her novels, I went back and read everything she had written up to that point. Now, every few years, I return to one of her delightfully realistic novels, and I still get the same thrill I had gotten from them in the beginning.

As far as I know, every Anne Tyler novel takes place in Baltimore. Baltimore has become rather a mythical place for us readers where the residents are rather oddball but usually quite engaging.

“How we handle day-to-day life as we go through it, with its disappointments and its pleasures, that’s all I want to know,” – Anne Tyler, a Guardian interview

In ‘Three Days in June’, the daughter of Gail Baines is getting married in a very traditional wedding after the pandemic. I’m not sure that recent weddings have returned to the traditional form. The “three days” in the title are the day before the wedding, the day of the wedding, and the day after the wedding. Each day gets one chapter.

Gail’s ex-husband Max comes up for the wedding and stays with Gail. This would be unusual except in an Anne Tyler novel. Max is one of Tyler’s typical oddball-but-likeable male characters, scruffy and hapless but good-hearted. He brings a stray animal shelter kitten with him. Max is “the kind of man who would never ever in his life knowingly harm another person”.

What is exceptional about ‘Three Days in June’ for an Anne Tyler novel is that its theme is marriage infidelity, not Max’s but Gail’s.

“Why had I, who truly loved my husband – at least in the on-again-off-again, maybe-maybe-not, semi-happy way of just about any married woman – broken apart my whole world for a man I never really knew? But maybe that was just it: I hadn’t known him. There are times when that can be the strongest draw of all.”

As always, Anne Tyler brings a light touch to this story of marital unfaithfulness which is probably why she is underrated. Anne Tyler is never in her writing obscure. All of her fictional situations are as clear as a bell.

Perhaps the best style of all is no self-conscious style.

Grade:   A

‘Redhead by the Side of the Road’ by Anne Tyler (2020) – 192 pages

In a review of Anne Tyler’s early novel ‘Searching for Caleb’ for the New Yorker in 1975, John Updike wrote “Funny and lyric and true, exquisite in its details and ambitious in its design…This writer is not merely good, she is wickedly good.” Updike took an interest in Tyler’s work and reviewed her next four novels as well, thus launching Tyler’s career into the stratosphere where she has remained since then. The English novelist Nick Hornby has stated that his ambition was to be a male Anne Tyler.

I have read nearly every one of Anne Tyler’s twenty-three novels, even the first four which she doesn’t like anymore but which I thought were very good. All of her novels take place in Baltimore, and that city has Anne Tyler bus tours for tourists except during the lock down. Tyler’s subject has always been the inexplicable personal mysteries in our ordinary routine day-to-day lives. She finds the fascination in even the most mundane of lives. Her novels of ordinary people connect with us readers on a visceral level.

However…

Micah Mortimer in ‘Redhead by the Side of the Road’ is still another of Anne Tyler’s gentle, cautious, fastidious male characters who view women, especially women with whom they might have a close relationship, as disruptive and a source of problems and thus trouble. He is in his forties and has never been married. In many ways Micah is the archetype for most of the males that appear in Tyler’s novels. He is seemingly happy with his life in his small apartment which he keeps fussily clean. Micah is a home computer software guy who runs his own small door-to-door business in Baltimore. He has a girlfriend Cass who is a school teacher.

Tyler starts the novel with these lines about Micah:

“You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer. He lives alone; he keeps to himself; his routine is etched in stone.”

Etched in stone? That was the problem for me. Anne Tyler has used this same type of male character in so many of her novels, it’s almost like she etches them in stone. These quiet, finicky, mild guys have become almost a formula for Tyler. The novel had somewhat of a “been there, done that” feel for me. This guy Micah seemed like nearly every other male character who has ever shown up in an Anne Tyler novel.

I suppose I would have been bowled over by ‘Redhead by the Side of the Road’ if I had not read so much Anne Tyler before.

Grade:    B