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Tyler presents us with Micah Mortimer, a computer technician who lives on his own but has a ‘woman friend’ - he refused to call anyone in his late thirties a “girlfriend” and has difficulty connecting with others on a personal level. But if you’ve read it, that may seem like a complicated way to start talking about a simple story. I offer this observation as a preface to my review of Anne Tyler’s Redhead by the Side of the Road, because I can’t help thinking that talking about authorial intrusion is a useful way to approach this novel. John Fowles went further in his 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman when he first appears in a railway car as the author, watching his creation Charles Smithson, and later when he entirely undermines the conventions of 19 th Century Realism by offering his reader two different endings from which to choose. As narrator, Jane Eyre draws attention to the construction of her story as a novel: dear reader I married him. In novels it might happen when the author intrudes upon the narrative to direct the reader or comment upon what is happening. In theatre it would be called ‘breaking the fourth’ wall, that moment when the artifice of stagecraft is foregrounded at the expense of verisimilitude. Postmodern fiction and 19 th Century novels have something in common.
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