A Patchwork Planet

by Anne Tyler (Fawcett Ballantine 1998)

All of Anne Tyler’s protagonists are quirky, and Barnaby Gaitlin is no exception. Born into a wealthy family, Barnaby has turned his back on the family foundation after an adolescence rife with bad choices and petty criminality. A good soul and honest to a fault (now that he is an adult), Barnaby works at an equally quirky little business called Rent-a-Back, which essentially provides a combination handy(wo)men and Jacks-of-all-Trades to mostly elderly clients who are aging in place, as we like to say today. They do odd jobs, move furniture, clean out cupboards and storage areas, fix broken items, lift heavy objects, rake leaves, shovel snow–whatever needs to be done, sometimes singly and sometimes in pairs. Barnaby often teams up with a female co-worker named Martine.

A failed marriage to Natalie has left Barnaby with a daughter of about nine, Opal, who lives with her mother in Philadelphia; the book opens with Barnaby about to take the train from his native Baltimore to visit Opal, but he is distracted by a fellow passenger, a sleek-looking woman who agrees to take a forgotten passport to a stranger’s daughter with an international flight to catch. Barnaby becomes obsessed with the woman, Sophia Maynard, who also lives in Baltimore but visits her mother in Philadelphia every weekend. He contrives a meeting, and Sophia, favorably impressed, arranges for her elderly aunt, Mrs. Glynn, to use Rent-a-Back’s services. Before long, Barnaby and Sophia are immersed in a torrid affair. Sophia appears to overlook Barnaby’s checkered past, and Barnaby half believes that Sophia is his guardian angel. But after a while, Barnaby realizes that it is actually his crimes that make him so attractive to Sophia; she doesn’t really trust him, but enjoys the risk dating him provides. Tyler keeps the reader guessing as to whether Barnaby and Sophia’s love will endure, so I won’t spill the beans here.

I always enjoy Ann Tyler’s novels. I am more the Sophia type (good girl, always doing what is expected) than the Barnaby type (quirky, preferring to live on the boundaries of a settled life than to compromise values), but she makes her characters personable and appealing (if exhausting at times), and I always enjoy following their foibles and triumphs.