Barnaby Gaitlin is a loser - just short of thirty he's the black sheep of a philanthropic Baltimore family. Once upon a time he had a home, a loving wife, a little family of his own; now he has an ex-wife, a 9-year-old daughter with attitude, a Corvette Sting Ray that's a collectors item but unreliable, and he works as hired muscle for Rent-a-Back, doing heavy chores for old folks. He has an almost pathological curiosity about other people's lives, which has got him into serious trouble in the past, and a hopeles charm ...
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Barnaby Gaitlin is a loser - just short of thirty he's the black sheep of a philanthropic Baltimore family. Once upon a time he had a home, a loving wife, a little family of his own; now he has an ex-wife, a 9-year-old daughter with attitude, a Corvette Sting Ray that's a collectors item but unreliable, and he works as hired muscle for Rent-a-Back, doing heavy chores for old folks. He has an almost pathological curiosity about other people's lives, which has got him into serious trouble in the past, and a hopeles charm which attracts the kind of angelic woman who wants to save him from himself. Tyler's observation is more acute and more delicious than ever; her humour slyer and more irresistible; her characters so vividly realised that you feel you've known this quirky collection for ever. With perfect pitch and poise, humor and humanity, Anne Tyler chronicals, better than any writer today, the sublime and the rediculous of everyday living, the foibles and frailties of the ordinary human heart.
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Anne Tyler's novel "The Patchwork Planet" (1998) tells a small particular story that radiates. Tyler tells a belated coming of age story about Barnaby Gitlin, 30, who is trying to overcome a troubled past and discover what he wants to do in life. Barnaby is the first-person narrator of his tale which is set primarily in Baltimore but also in Philadelphia and on the trains between the cities.
Barnaby is divorced with a daughter, Opal, 9 who lives with her mother Natalie and her husband in the exclusive Rittenhouse Square neighborhood of Philadelphia. Barnaby himself is the child of the well-t0-do Gaitlin family which had made its fortune generations earlier when an ancestor had taken the advice of his guardian angel. Barnaby searches throughout the book for his own guardian angel to make something of his life. He had had a youth of delinquency breaking into neighboring homes and looking into their letters and intimate possessions without actually stealing. He also had set fire to his parent's home. Upon returning from a high end reform school, Barnaby took a low paying job for a small company, Rent-a-Back which involved heavy lifting, moving items, and running errands for a largely senior clientele. He has an uneasy relationship with his parents, especially his mother who is from a middling, not-wealthy background, and lives in a cramped, basement apartment.
Barnaby is a loner but his relationships with many people, his parents, grandparents on his mother's side. and the elderly clients for whom he works are intricately described in his story. But the book turns most on Barnaby's relationship with two women. Early in the book, Barnaby meets Sophia, 36, during the course of his monthly train trips to Philadelphia to see his daughter. Sophia is a bank loan office, dignified, prim, and organized. She and Barnaby gradually develop what may be a lasting relationship. At one point, Barnaby sees Sophia as the angel for whom he seeks, but this view is dispelled.
Martine is the other primary character in Barnaby's story. She is small in build, rugged, muscular, and colloquial. She works with Barnaby at Rent-a-Back and the two spend much time together, work and social. Their relationship status is uncertain.
The story is localized and particular inside Barnaby's mind and with others as he tries to find his angel and a course for his life. Characters are developed in convincing scenes, showing the vicissitudes of old age and the pulls of social class. Barnaby carries on trying to be good and to do his job with the burden of his early life behind him.
The story is localized and inward but it gradually mirrors out. Late in the novel, after an unsuccessful visit to Opal on her 10th birthday, Barnaby sits by himself in a Philadelphia park and has something of an epiphany as he reflects upon his life and in particular upon his relationships with women and with his former wife Natalie. Another brief scene late in the story gives the novel its title. One of Barnaby's favorite clients, a Mrs. Alford, has passed on. With her failing eyesight, she has spent her moments working on a quilt of the blue planet, the earth. The quilt is hinted at throughout the story but Barnaby sees it only upon Mrs. Alford's death. Barnaby describes what he sees in the quilt.
"I'd heard about that planet quilt often, but I'd never seen it. What I had pictured was a kind of fabric map-- a plaid Canada, a gingham U.S. Instead the circle was made up of mismatched squares of cloth no bigger than postage stamps, joined by the uneven black stitches of a woman whose eyesight was failing. Planet Earth, in Mrs. Alford's version, was makeshift and haphazard, clumsily cobbled together, overlapping and crowded and likely to fall into pieces at any moment."
Barnaby's story broadens both inwardly and outwardly. From a story of a troubled man in search of himself, Tyler has created a story of family life and its tensions, the difficulties of aging, the force of social classes, and the need for love. These human searches for meaning occur on a planet with is "makeshift and haphazard" and "likely to fall into pieces at any moment." I found much to be pondered in this moving, engaging novel by Anne Tyler.
