The Accidental Tourist By Anne Tyler

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The Accidental Tourist By Anne Tyler

Life just is. You have to flow with it.
Give yourself to the moment. Let it happen.
-Jerry Brown
If an individual allows changes to occur in one’s life, then love can be the wonderful result of that acceptance. The theme of reasons why we love and how we love different people is demonstrated throughout the book The Accidental Tourist, written by Anne Tyler. There are two main characters that undergo and accept the changes in their lives, and one character that stays static throughout the book, helping one of the characters to change. Macon Leary is first grounded by loneliness and comfort, then slowly opens himself up to what appears to be a whole new world for him. Then, there is Sarah Leary, who controls some of the changes in her life, and tries to make the best of the rest of them. The character that remains the same throughout the book is Muriel Pritchett—a dog-trainer who takes an interest in Macon and helps him to accept the changes in his life. Above all, the universal theme of this book is love—a surprising new journey for all the characters.
In the beginning of the book, it is explained how Macon and Sarah Leary’s son is murdered and how their marriage suffers because of this. Sarah leaves Macon, which is the beginning stage of Macon’s renovated life, but one that does not start off happily: “He didn’t eat real meals anymore…His hair, which Sarah used to cut for him, jutted over his forehead like a shelf. Ande something had caused his lower lids to droop. He used to have narrow gray slits of eyes; now they were wide and startled…” (14). Macon is not at all used to living alone. He wants to control everything and likes nothing to be left to chance—Sarah’s departure is not something he can control and he does not deal with it well. Macon begins to think that he cannot live without his wife, but soon realizes a few things that really make him think about the marriage:
His brain buzzed with little worries…The worries changed, grew deeper, he wondered what had gone wrong with his marriage. Sarah had been his first and only girlfriend; now he thought he should have practiced on someone else beforehand. During the twenty years of their marriage there’s been moments—there’s been months—when he didn’t feel they had really formed a unit the way couples were supposed to. No, the stayed two distinct people, and now always even friends. Sometimes they’d seemed more like rivals, elbowing each other, competing over who was ...

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