The Accidental Tourist

Macon Leary

Macon Leary’s son Ethan was shot and killed in a fast-food restaurant by a drifter when he was twelve. His wife Sarah could not stay in a marriage where both people reminded the other of what had been lost. Macon, alone, moves back into the house where he and his siblings grew up, with his sister Rose and brothers Charles and Porter, who have never fully left.

He writes travel guides: The Accidental Tourist in France, The Accidental Tourist in Great Britain. The guides are for people who travel on business and would prefer not to — they explain where to find American-style breakfasts in Paris, how to avoid conversing with strangers, how to maintain your routine in an alien environment. They are very popular.

Muriel

Macon’s dog Edward has become unmanageable since Ethan’s death. A dog trainer named Muriel Pritchett takes the case. She is thin, brightly coloured, apparently improvised from whatever materials were available. She has a sickly son, an uncertain past, and a persistence that Macon’s systems cannot entirely resist.

The Accidental Tourist was adapted into a 1988 film with William Hurt, Geena Davis (who won an Academy Award for her role as Muriel), and Kathleen Turner. The film is faithful to the novel’s tone. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1985.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Accidental Tourist apart: Macon Leary is one of American fiction’s most fully realised portraits of protective withdrawal — his systems are funny and heartbreaking in equal measure; Muriel Pritchett is Tyler’s most vivid secondary character — eccentric, persistent, entirely herself; and The Leary family, with their alphabetically arranged food and dog that climbs bookshelves, is one of Tyler’s great comic inventions. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The Accidental Tourist give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Recovery from grief is not linear and is not chosen — it happens through the specific intrusion of someone who will not accept your system. Macon’s travel guides are a perfect metaphor for his worldview: how to minimise the surprise of being alive. The Leary family’s elaborate systems for managing ordinary life are a comedy of human efforts to avoid feeling. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Anne Tyler’s prose in The Accidental Tourist is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

Some readers find the novel’s tone too gentle given the grief at its centre. The resolution is tidier than life and some find the ending too comfortably earned. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Literary fiction readers who want a novel of grief and recovery told with warmth and formal precision, and readers of Tyler’s body of work.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Tyler’s most beloved novel; Macon’s recovery is one of American fiction’s most tact-fully rendered transformations.

Grief, Habit, and the Possibility of Change

What gives The Accidental Tourist its quiet power is Anne Tyler’s tender, comic study of a man so wounded by loss that he has organized his entire life around the avoidance of feeling. Macon Leary, a travel writer who hates travel and writes guides for people who would rather not leave home, is paralyzed by grief and routine until an irrepressibly eccentric dog trainer disrupts his careful defenses. Tyler observes his slow, halting movement back toward life with her characteristic warmth, humor, and compassion for ordinary people, refusing both sentimentality and despair. The novel’s gentle insight into how habit protects us from pain, and how love demands the risk of change, has made it one of her most beloved works, a wise and funny meditation on grief, family, and the courage required to begin again.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Anne Tyler
• Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler — Full Review
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen — Full Review

The National Book Critics Circle Award and the Film

The Accidental Tourist was published in 1985 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction the same year. The film adaptation, directed by Lawrence Kasdan in 1988, starred William Hurt as Macon Leary and Geena Davis as the dog trainer Muriel Pritchett; Davis won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the role, describing in her acceptance speech the character as “the most fun part I’ve ever had.” The film was well-received critically and introduced Tyler’s work to a significantly wider audience.

Tyler and the Ordinary Life

Anne Tyler is among the American novelists most consistently committed to the ordinary as her subject — not ordinary lives under extraordinary pressure, but ordinary lives as they are, with their specific textures of habit, embarrassment, and reluctant change. Macon Leary, who writes travel guides for people who hate to travel and who constructs his life to minimise surprise and contact, is Tyler’s most concentrated study of a particular defensive mode of living. His wife’s grief after their son’s murder has not had the effect of bringing them together but of making each unable to reach the other; it is Muriel — chaotic, intrusive, relentlessly alive — who breaks through the structure Macon has built around his own existence. The novel is precise about the mechanics of how people resist change and, very slowly and partially, change anyway.

Pulitzer Context and Anne Tyler’s Career

The Accidental Tourist won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985 and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. The 1988 film, with William Hurt as Macon Leary and Geena Davis as Muriel Pritchett, won Davis the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress; Hurt received a Best Actor nomination. Anne Tyler received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Breathing Lessons in 1989, the novel that followed The Accidental Tourist.