For years, Anne Tyler has been one of my few exceptions to the
"I'll buy it in paperback" rule. Her characters leap off the pages
and into my heart and mind. When I finished THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST,
I went on a Tyler reading binge. I've waited impatiently for each
novel since. Some, inevitably, were destined to become favorites. A
PATCHWORK PLANET currently tops this list.

In A PATCHWORK PLANET, Tyler returns to what she does best ---
writing about the common lives of average people in a way that
penetrates the ordinary to reveal the extraordinary. This is
Barnaby Gaitlin's story. Barnaby, in his own words, is a "man you
can trust." As the black sheep of an established and philanthropic
Baltimore family, he lives on the margins. As teenagers, Barnaby
and his friends went on thieving missions in their privileged
neighborhoods. Barnaby, though, was far less interested in stealing
people's property than using the window into their lives that
breaking and entering and looking through their belongings
presented to him. Barnaby was the one who got caught in the
neighbors' bushes holding their valuable property, and he was sent
off to the Renascence School, a special school for "the gifted
young tester of limits."  

When he got out of Renascence, he went to work for "Rent-A-Back," a
business that sends strong young people to help folks put their
Christmas trees up, move furniture, bring in the groceries, take
out the trash --- whatever they need to continue to live
independently. The work takes Barnaby into the homes and lives of
people who have no reason not to trust him and build relationships
with him. He likes the work because it puts him into their lives,
allowing him to continue the voyeurism from his teens that has left
him mostly on the outside of others' lives, looking in. And he
likes these people, with their flaws and quirks, because they
appreciate him, even with his flaws --- something most of his
family is unable to do.  

The Gaitlin family runs a charitable foundation, dispensing
compassionate assistance to those in need yet unable to dispense
forgiveness or understanding to their rogue son. Barnaby goes home
for family gatherings, but he rarely finds happiness or acceptance
there. His mother never loses an opportunity to remind him what he
has cost the family in not only shame and heartache, but in the
cold, hard cash it took to hush up his youthful misdeeds. The
family sees only the commonness of his work, never understanding
that he lives out the kind of compassion on a daily basis that they
only experience from a benevolent, check-writing
distance.  

Grandfather Gaitlin began the foundation based on a message from an
angel. Each Gaitlin since has waited for his angel to bring him a
message for his life. While Barnaby waits and looks, he continues
to rent out his back and offer his compassion to strangers, while
trying to piece together relationships with his distant daughter,
his parents, brother, and Sophia, who might or might not be his
angel. She becomes his girlfriend, moving her Crock Pot into his
world and giving him a sense of what passes with other people for
"normal" life.

"Sophia" is Greek for "wisdom," and this Sophia appears to be the
one who can help Barnaby put the pieces together. But Barnaby's
life lessons are not like the pieces of the patchwork quilt of
earth that one of his client is making. They must be learned in
their own way. As he moves through the lives, heartaches,
celebrations, and deaths of those around him, he opens their eyes
and hearts to the presence of grace in the world. It is this grace
that pieces all of us together --- "makeshift and haphazard,
clumsily cobbled together, overlapping and crowded and likely to
fall to pieces at any moment."

Tyler moves the story with her own kind of grace, sharing this
world, in its intricate and loving detail, with breath-taking
prose. The three years since the publication of her last novel has
been worth the wait.