When Anne Tyler’s UK tour for her latest novel became an early victim of the coronavirus, and her publisher announced that the 78-year-old would be conducting all media interviews by phone from the safety of her home in Baltimore, Tyler felt some relief, but mainly she felt guilt. She is one of the world’s most acclaimed modern novelists, winner of both a Pulitzer (for Breathing Lessons, 1988) and the National Book Critics Circle award (for The Accidental Tourist, 1995, which was turned into an Oscar-winning film) and a finalist for the Man Booker (A Spool of Blue Thread, 2015) and the Women’s prize for fiction (Ladder of Years from 1995, and A Spool of Blue Thread). But until 2012, she maintained a silence as assiduous as that of Thomas Pynchon or JD Salinger. She never liked – and still doesn’t, but needs must in today’s world – talking about how she does what she does, because that leads to self-consciousness, which is never good for creativity.

So she was “kind of relieved” when the tour was cancelled. “But I remember I used to pray the school would burn down before a math test the next day. Yet if it had actually burned down I would have felt so guilty. So now I’m thinking, ‘Oh dear, be careful what you wish for!’” she says.

Phone interviews are generally frustrating, a mess of missed connections and awkward interruptions. But Tyler has a manner that is as open and engaging as her prose, her conversation punctuated by charming anachronisms such as “bestir” and “alas”, and it soon feels as if I know her as well as I know her brilliantly drawn characters. As I, too, am now working from home I start by apologising for the background noise of children and dogs. “Oh I love to hear children and dogs! That sounds good to me. I love normal life,” she says.

For the past half-century, Tyler has been the pre-eminent novelist of normal life. She is famously good at summing up a character in a precise line (“She had not grown fuller or softer with age. She was like certain supermarket vegetables that turn from green to withered without ever ripening” – from Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, 1982), but twice she tells me she is “no good at plot, as I’m sure you’ve noticed”. It’s true that no one would mistake aTyler novel for a John Grisham, but no one can match her evocation of the moments that build up a life: the awkward family meals, the day your spouse suddenly seems like a stranger, trying to make sense of how you have become the adult you are today, the conflicted gestures we make at trying to be good. “Time passing is a plot. You can’t not have something happen if the years go by,” she says.

As a child, Tyler’s favourite book was the American classic The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton, about a house watching a city sprout up around it. Her fans – who have ranged from John Updike to Jacqueline Wilson to Nick Hornby – will recognise her memory of hoping the school would burn down as classic Tyler: her novels are studded with adult characters evoking childhood sensations, pleating time, revealing the truth of the adult through the child they were. In 2018’s Clock Dance, a widow compares recovering from grief to “rainy days in her childhood when she would resign herself to staying in, reading or watching daytime TV, and then in the afternoon the sun would break through unexpectedly and she would think, Oh. I guess I can go outside now. Isn’t that … a good thing, I guess.” In The Accidental Tourist, Macon Leary empathetically imagines his young son Ethan’s last moments before he was killed in a violent crime: “meekly moving to the kitchen with the others, placing his hands flat against the wall as he was ordered and no doubt bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet”.

“I’m more in touch with my emotions and the visceral sensory from childhood than any other part of life. I don’t know if it helps with creativity, but I do know that when I talk to other writers they talk about their childhood in great detail,” Tyler says. (She also still has residues of that childlike belief that one can make something happen by thinking about it. Just as she used to worry she would cause the school to burn down through wishing it, when I ask how she could bear to write the scene of Ethan’s murder in The Accidental Tourist, she says she deliberately made him younger than her two daughters were then, “so I wouldn’t think as they came up to that age, ‘Oh no, what have I set in motion?’”)

I am very comfortable writing as a man, and I think that’s because I had really good men in my life

Her new novel, Redhead by the Side of the Road, her 23rd, features many of the usual Tyler tropes. Its protagonist, Micah, is a man, as so many of Tyler’s greatest characters are, which is partly why she has so many male fans. Writing in this paper in 2012, Mark Lawson put her cross-gender appeal down to the way “she deals sympathetically and redemptively with male fecklessness and helplessness”. Tyler grew up with three brothers and was happily married for 34 years to Taghi Mohammad Modarressi, an Iranian psychiatrist, until his death in 1997. “I am very comfortable writing as a man, and I think that’s because I had really good men in my life. They made me feel comfortable and I thought, ‘OK, they’re not so different from me,’” she says.

Like many of Tyler’s male characters – Ian in Saint Maybe, Barnaby in A Patchwork Planet, Jesse in Breathing Lessons, Ezra in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant – Micah has let his life drift past him after a youthful regret. Like Macon in The Accidental Tourist, he tries to counter the loss of control over his life by adhering to self-coined rules about when he cleans the kitchen, how he makes the bed, how he drives. “Micah” even sounds like “Macon”, but when I ask Tyler if the echo was deliberate she says no. “But I do often have fantasies about my characters ending up in the same little part of town and running into one another, so I can picture Micah and Macon doing that.”

Like all of Tyler’s characters, Micah lives in Baltimore, as Tyler herself has done for more than 50 years. She has said that she’s a writer so she can live out different lives, but it seems that whatever life she imagines, she always wants to live in Baltimore. “Yes, that’s probably true. It’s a city with character, but it is also laziness on my part – by setting the book here I don’t have to do much research,” she says with easy self-deprecation. I cannot let that pass: her books are full of meticulous research, such as the accurate period details in her decades-spanning family sagas, The Amateur Marriage and A Spool of Blue Thread. She meticulously writes her books out in longhand multiple times, and then reads them into a recorder and listens back to make sure the dialogue suits each character and there are no clangers. The idea that Tyler defaults to anything in her books out of laziness is nonsense – she just loves her city.

“It’s true, I do love it,” she says. “It’s funny, it was a total accident that I came to the city, it was just for my husband’s job. For the first two years we were saying, ‘We made a mistake, let’s go back.’ But then you sink in, little by little.”

Unlike her other novels, Redhead by the Side of the Road features multiple references to current events. Micah avoids watching the news because it’s too “depressing”, but he can’t block out the “unspeakably sad” bulletins from his clock radio: “a mass shooting in a synagogue; whole families are dying in Yemen; immigrant children torn from their parents will never, ever be the same, even if by some unlikely chance they are reunited tomorrow.”

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler review – quietly profound Read more

“I was writing the book already by the time Trump was in office and all that was going on. So I consciously felt it would be immoral to pretend life was just la la la. I don’t want to be one of those people who ties their novel to current events so it’s practically out of a newspaper, but at the same time I felt I should mention that it is an unhappy time,” she says. Her books often end optimistically, showing human kindness. But is she having trouble maintaining that optimism about humanity in the current political climate? She hesitates for a second. “Not up close, if you know what I mean. Up close you’ll always see things to be optimistic about.”

Tyler grew up in Quaker communities around the south and midwest, the eldest of four children. She did not attend mainstream school until she was 11, and a common theme in her books is a character looking at the “normal” world and trying to understand how it works, such as Micah feeling bewildered by the happy couples he sees on his morning jogs, or Aaron flummoxed by marriage in The Beginner’s Goodbye: “It seemed we just never quite got the hang of being a couple the way other people did. We should have taken lessons or something; that’s what I tell myself.”

“One of the first things that happened when I joined the school was I was surrounded by these girls and they were asking me all these questions. One said, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’m only 11.’ And she said, ‘I know, do you have a boyfriend?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, I’m in another world here.’ It was very tough to figure out, and I remember it very clearly,” Tyler says. While at university, she started to write short stories, and then published her first novel, The Tin Can Tree, when she was 23. Aside from a five-year break to raise her daughters, she has written steadily ever since.

I was a better writer when I was younger. I took more time. It’s not as if I’m in a rush now, but I trust the reader more

“I know the world does not need another book from me, but I have nothing else to do with myself. I have no hobbies. So then I feel guilty when I say to my agent, ‘I seem to have another book ready if you want to take a look at it …’” she says. Her ideal day would involve several hours of “good involved writing, the kind when you suddenly look up and three hours have gone by”.

While liking Tyler’s books is as uncontroversial as liking chocolate, there have been some criticisms over the years, some more fair than others. Those who dismiss her as sentimental (“our foremost NutraSweet novelist”, one American critic wrote) overlook the biting humour in her work. “Repetitive” is more merited, although the familiar plots are shells for her elegant writing and characterisation, which are never boring. Yet I’ve found some of her more recent novels less satisfying than her mid-career peak of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist and Breathing Lessons. The New York Times’ former book critic Michiko Kakutani put it more strongly in 2012 when she complained that instead of the “intimate knowledge of her characters’ inner lives” we get in Tyler’s earlier books, the characters in The Beginner’s Goodbye are “irritating stick figures”.

But Tyler is her own best critic. She recently reread The Accidental Tourist for the first time in many years. “And one of the things I thought was, ‘I think I was a better writer when I was younger.’” What made her think that? “I was more detailed, I took more time. It’s not as if I’m in a rush now, but I trust the reader more. I don’t feel like I have to say that much about the character’s inner feelings. But then as I read The Accidental Tourist I thought, ‘Well, it’s kind of nice to see all of Macon’s inner feelings there.’” Aptly for a writer who always sees the best in her characters, Tyler’s mistake was perhaps trusting some of her readers too much.

Her daughters live in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and Tyler knows she has a tendency towards self-isolation, whether there’s a global pandemic or not, “and I don’t think that’s always healthy”. So “to bring the world into me”, she has – when life is normal – regular nights at her home with friends, including a weekly friendship group she calls “Wine Therapy”. She is already working on her next book, “and once again, it’s about a family and set in Baltimore”, she says in a tone of pure self-mockery. Then with the grace that comes from a lifetime of self-knowledge, sinking in little by little, she adds, “And I love all that.”