A new Anne Tyler novel is always a welcome event, but if there was ever a time when we needed the life-affirming qualities of her work, it’s in the midst of a life-threatening global pandemic. In REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, a gentle story of missed connections and second chances, Tyler delivers a soothing dose of the antidote for some of our anxiety and enforced isolation.

Not surprisingly, the book is set in familiar Tyler territory: her hometown of Baltimore. Its unassuming protagonist, 43-year-old Micah Mortimer, lives in a nondescript neighborhood, in the basement of a small apartment building where he moonlights as the superintendent. Micah runs a technology repair business --- Tech Hermit --- making house calls for everything from a balky printer to a lost password, and he’s written a manual for novice computer users, modestly titled First, Plug It In.

"In REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, a gentle story of missed connections and second chances, Tyler delivers a soothing dose of the antidote for some of our anxiety and enforced isolation."

Above all, Micah prizes order and predictability, his routine “etched in stone.” Every day of the week has its assigned domestic tasks, and when he’s driving, he imagines he’s being watched by a surveillance system he calls “Traffic God,” which is “operated by a fleet of men in shirtsleeves and green visors who frequently commented to one another on the perfection of Micah’s driving.” Micah’s woman friend, Cass Slade (he rejects the term “girl” for a female in her 30s), is a fourth-grade teacher. It appears that shared meals predominate over romance in their relationship. Micah admits he hasn’t had a “very good history with women. It just seemed they kept losing interest in him; he couldn’t exactly say why.” In the end, he concludes, “living with someone full-time was just too messy” for this fastidious man.

On the surface, it seems that Micah has struck a reasonable bargain with life, eschewing excitement and variety for order and predictability. “Really, his life was good,” Micah thinks, as he completes another flawless drive. “He had no reason to feel unhappy.” But with Micah, we realize “how repetitious all his thoughts were, how they ran in a deep rut and how his entire life ran in a rut, really.”

That settled existence is upended when 18-year-old Brink Bartell Adams appears at his apartment one morning. Brink, the son of Micah’s college girlfriend, Lorna Bartell --- the woman he’s thought of for more than 20 years as his “first great romance” --- has left college and is hiding out from his parents, both lawyers in Washington, DC. He’s dropped in on Micah, someone he thinks of as an “odd-jobs guy,” more his type of person than his overachieving parents, sparking a moment of regret for Micah that he’s become a “poster boy for layabouts.”

In the process of thoughtfully engineering a reunion between Brink and Lorna, Micah “was visited by a kind of translucent scarf of a memory floating down upon him,” in Tyler’s casually beautiful image, and he comes to understand the truth about his relationship with Lorna and the reason it ended. Though the stakes of the novel aren’t especially high, from the beginning, Micah, who thinks of himself as a “roomful of broken hearts,” is such a pleasantly engaging character that it’s impossible not to root for him to find true happiness --- and especially the love of a caring woman --- even as one realizes that in his carefully constructed life, he simply may have forgotten how to look for it.

Tyler doesn’t clutter her story with subplots, and what complications there are are modest, so it’s possible to slip quickly through this slim novel in a couple of hours. But in that brief interval, with her customary grace and humanity, she helps us escape effortlessly from life’s real troubles to fiction’s invented ones. That’s the gift that makes it impossible to leave Micah Mortimer without a wistful feeling and the hope that things turn out well for him, and for us, in the end.