Friday, April 17, 1998 | 10:28 a.m.
Cuteness may be nice in a Beanie Baby, but it's not something you really want in a novel.
Anne Tyler's novels - with their eccentric heroes, their homespun details, their improbable, often heartwarming plots - have often flirted with cuteness, but they've been saved from sentimentality in the past by the author's innate storytelling gifts, her shrewd understanding of familial dynamics and her rich emotional wisdom.
For some reason, none of these redemptive qualities is on display in her latest novel, "A Patchwork Planet" - a novel that feels strangely perfunctory and contrived.
Barnaby Gaitlin, the hero, is another one of Ms. Tyler's oddballs - another lost male, like Macon Leary in "The Accidental Tourist" or Ian Bedloe in "Saint Maybe," who has slipped into an early midlife funk.
At 29, Barnaby considers himself a loser: he lives in a squalid rented room in another family's house and works part time moving furniture and doing household chores with a service called "Rent-a-Back." His wife, Natalie, has divorced him and wants him to stop visiting their daughter, Opal. His wealthy parents have never forgiven him for the petty crimes he committed as a teen-ager, and his snooty brother, Jeff, looks down on him as a lazy ne'er-do-well who will never grow up.
Of course, Barnaby is supposed to be a lovable ne'er-do-well. When he broke into houses with friends, he riffled through people's photo albums while his pals were looking for car keys, cigarettes and booze. And when he actually stole something, he took only mementos like a little snow globe or a brass egg. He is fond of using fuddy-duddy expressions like "scads of money" and saying "Ah, me."
Like so many Tyler characters, Barnaby sees himself as something of a rebel, though he actually has quite a bit in common with his family and its traditions. His family runs a foundation that gives money to the poor, and Barnaby, in his way, is a do-gooder too: as a "Rent-a-Back" employee, he not only helps a lot of elderly folks with chores they cannot perform but also serves as their friend, confidant and booster. People are constantly telling him that he has a kind heart.
One of the Gaitlin family's favorite beliefs is that each Gaitlin has his or her very own angel. The angel of Barnaby's great-grandfather told him to manufacture a personalized dress form called the Twinform, which made him scads of money, and the angel of Barnaby's brother told him to get out of the stock market just before it fell. All the Gaitlins write up their angel encounters in matching gray cloth ledgers with maroon leather corners.
Barnaby has been wondering if his personal angel will ever show up, when he meets - well, accosts - a matronly woman named Sophia on the train to Philadelphia. He decides that this stolid bank employee must be his angel.
Before long, Sophia has retained Barnaby's services for her aunt, and within weeks, Sophia and Barnaby are dating. Barnaby feels his life is beginning to change: he makes a concerted effort to be a better father to Opal, he pays off the debt he owes his parents, and he determines to put his affairs in order. And for a while, things are decidedly better - that is, until Sophia's aunt accuses him of stealing her secret stash of cash.
Unfortunately for the reader, it's hard to care a lot about what happens to Barnaby or Sophia. In the past, Ms. Tyler's gift for sympathy and emotional insight has pulled her characters back from the brink of caricature, but this time her people feel oddly flimsy and paper-dollish.
Barnaby is a black sheep with a heart of gold. Sophia is a pleasant-faced spinster with a will of iron. Barnaby's mother is a pretentious witch. His father is an uptight twit. And his co-worker Martine is a tiny ball of fire.
Ms. Tyler's earlier characters tended to be situated within a thick matrix of finely nuanced familial relationships that helped define both their dreams and their limitations; the people in this novel, in contrast, seem much more like lone wolves, pulled this way and that by the author's puppet strings. Barnaby's relationships with his family are diagrammatic at best, and his tics, like the tics of the other characters, belie no deeper psychological truth.
Ms. Tyler's famous ability to limn the daily minutiae of life also feels weary and formulaic this time around. Do we really care whether sauerkraut agrees with the digestive system of one of Barnaby's clients? Do we really care whether March is the right month to take down the storm windows in Baltimore?
As for the little details Ms. Tyler sprinkles over her story - the modeling clay cow on a Christmas tree, the patchwork picture of planet earth on an elderly woman's quilt, the angel drawing on the Gaitlin Foundation's letterhead - they, too, have a paint-by-numbers touch. They add up to a patchwork novel that feels hokey, mechanical . . . and yes, too cute.
Publication notes:
A PATCHWORK PLANET
By Anne Tyler
288 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.
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