The Accidental Tourist

The Accidental Tourist is a novel by the American writer Anne Tyler, published in 1985 and set in Baltimore.

Macon's family is the book's comic invention: his sister Rose and his brothers Porter and Charles live together in the house they grew up in, alphabetical groceries, unplugged telephones and all, and their habits are presented as a system for avoiding the world rather than as a set of quirks. Macon's own arrangements are the same kind of system, since his whole professional life consists of teaching people how to travel without encountering anything, and the novel takes his grief seriously without making it solemn. What changes his routine is the woman he hires to train the dog, Muriel Pritchett, who is younger, tactless, persistent and much better at living than he is. Tyler follows Macon through his publisher's courtship of Rose and through the slow, awkward process of someone learning to notice other people again, and she does it in plain sentences and small scenes. The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1985 and the Ambassador Book Award in 1986, and was filmed in 1988.