Anne Tyler
A Patchwork Planet
Toronto: Penguin Books, 1998. Pp. 288. $9.99
Reviewed by Nora Foster Stovel

Tyler, author of over a dozen novels and dozens of stories, may be the best novelist writing in the United States in recent decades. Her latest novel, A Patchwork Planet (originally published by Viking), is true to the tradition of her best-known works: The Accidental Tourist (1985; filmed 1988), Breathing Lessons (1988; televised 1994), and Saint Maybe (1991; televised 1998). Admired for her ironic portraits of eccentric characters and dysfunctional families, Tyler turns her sense of the extraordinary nature of ordinary people on certain denizens of her own town of Baltimore in A Patchwork Planet.

Every family has its black sheep. But when that family is the Gaitlin Foundation of Baltimore, the family failure is a black sheep in spades. Bad enough that Barnaby is the ne'er-do-well scion of one of Baltimore's premier families, but family myth has it that members of that family have their own personal angels. Barnaby's grandfather had a brief encounter with his angel, a young blonde woman who, by urging him to sell his Twinform patent, made his fortune. Since then, it has become a family tradition to discover one's angel and write up the encounter in the family ledgers. So what do you do if your family members all have their own angels and you do not? Naturally, you become a devil.

But Barnaby is a devil with a difference. Granted, as a teenager he broke into houses and stole things, but he did not bother with the silverware or television sets that his cohorts bagged. No, Barnaby rifled through their mail and snooped into their family photograph albums until he got caught and sent to the Renascence reform school. Could this be because his family - in their Tudor-style home, decorated with paintings filled with barbed wire and Brillo pads - is less than perfect? This dysfunctional family's potluck Thanksgiving dinner is symptomatic, resulting in two pumpkin pies and no turkey. Indeed, the only turkey is the sequinned one on Gram's T-shirt.

Barnaby is still having Thanksgiving dinner with his parents because he has managed to lose his wife and daughter. Though he married Natalie for her goodness, it soon became monotonous: "Once upon a time I'd had all I could ask for: a home, a loving wife, a little family of my own. A place in the world. How could I have thrown that away?" (218). Now, as he is about to turn thirty, he is still trying to discover his place on this planet.

As if Barnaby's burglary were not sufficient disgrace for the Gaitlins, he adds insult to injury by working at a blue-collar job. Rent-A-Back, Inc. provides services for stay-at-homes, primarily the terminally old, doing everything from clearing out the basement to decorating the Christmas tree. To these people, Barnaby is an angel, or at least a Good Samaritan, who puts their houses in order.

Cleaning out a client's house, Barnaby realizes, echoing Tyler's Earthly Possessions (1977), "that you really, truly can't take it with you": "No luggage is permitted" (284). Then Barnaby views the patchwork planet quilt created by one of his recently deceased clients, and it inspires an epiphany: Barnaby had always pictured "Planet Earth" as "a kind of fabric map- a plaid Canada, a gingham U.S. Instead the circle was made up of mismatched squares of cloth no bigger than postage stamps, joined by the uneven black stitches of a woman whose eyesight was failing. Planet Earth, in Mrs. Alford's version, was makeshift and haphazard, clumsily cobbled together, overlapping and crowded, and likely to fall into pieces at any moment " (261). The patchwork quilt, long an emblem of women's work, is an appropriate symbol for Tyler's novels: chronicling sequences of realistic and apparently random events, they move imperceptibly towards a remarkable revelation.

Readers who admired Saint Maybe will enjoy A Patchwork Planet. Following Barnaby Gaitlin on his quest for his angel and his place on this planet will be an amusing and enlightening odyssey.