synopsis of the accidental tourist anne tyler

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Accidental Tourist (Tyler)

The Accidental Tourist   Anne Tyler, 1985 Random House 352pp. ISBN-13: 9780345452009 Summary Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary. He is grounded by loneliness and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts when he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who up-ends Macon’s insular world–and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life. ( From the publisher .)

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Introduction & Overview of The Accidental Tourist

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The Accidental Tourist: A Novel Paperback – April 9, 2002

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date April 9, 2002
• Dimensions 5.13 x 0.76 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 0345452003
• ISBN-13 978-0345452009
• Lexile measure 890L
• See all details

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From the back cover, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (April 9, 2002)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0345452003
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0345452009
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 890L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.13 x 0.76 x 8 inches
• #1,895 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #2,622 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
• #5,581 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grownups, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Thread, Vinegar Girl and Clock Dance.

In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence; and in 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize.

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Customers say

Customers find the book great and enchanting. They also find the characters interesting, quirky, and strange. They describe the story as compelling, realistic, and filled with humor, tragedy, sadness, and recovery. Readers praise the writing quality as well-written, compelling, and lovely. They find the humor wryly amusing and the tone captivating, smart, brilliant, and hopeful. However, some customers feel the plot is not particularly interesting and not worth the price.

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Customers find the book a great read with interesting and believable characters. They also say the subject is wonderful. However, some find the read boring and others say it's good to read aloud.

"...Anne Tyler is a gifted author and there are so many tender sweet and funny quirky moments. Buy this one in hardback, you will want to read again." Read more

"...Touching, funny ... just a good old fashioned nice read ... lightweight enough to disappear into but well written enough to hold you captive..." Read more

"Unexpected ending. Worthy read with moments of despair and life goes on . . .regardless...." Read more

"...in observation and free of the usual romance tropes, this delightful novel delights and entertains at every turn. Highly recommended." Read more

Customers find the characters interesting, quirky, and strange. They also say the author makes the typical male character realistic and humorous.

"...Mason is not your typical male character, Tyler makes him realistic and humorous, even though his personality is a little dry and predictable, but I..." Read more

"...The story flowed convincingly and the characters were well constructed and their actions believable...." Read more

"...The characters are amazing . I wasn’t sure how I wanted it to end, but as the characters evolved, how I thought of them did too...." Read more

"...it slightly misses the point, Kathleen Turner is miscast, and many characters are gone ." Read more

Customers find the story poignant, funny, and satisfying. They also appreciate the unusual characters and how the author makes them believable. However, some find the plot unnerving, filled with humor, tragedy, sadness, and recovery.

"...It wasn't challenging but it was engrossing. The story flowed convincingly and the characters were well constructed and their actions believable...." Read more

" Unexpected ending . Worthy read with moments of despair and life goes on . . .regardless...." Read more

"...I'm sure I'll read it many more times. It's a very interesting story about how a man so "buttoned down" that he is almost catatonic first..." Read more

"...The 1988 film is a good adaptation, but it slightly misses the point , Kathleen Turner is miscast, and many characters are gone." Read more

Customers find the writing quality of the book well written, beautiful, and spot on. They also describe the author as gifted, empathetic, and engaging throughout the book. Customers also mention that the dialogue captures their devotions from the first few pages.

"...read ... lightweight enough to disappear into but well written enough to hold you captive (even if I wasn't fussed about the ending)!..." Read more

"...There are heartwarming, touching prose . I recommend it to Anne Tyler fans, or to anyone who lived through the 1980s!" Read more

"...The ending wasn't very satisfying to me. The writing is very good and there were some beautifully written scenes, but there was no "there"..." Read more

Customers find the humor in the book wryly amusing. They also appreciate the combined quirkiness of the characters.

"...Tyler is a gifted author and there are so many tender sweet and funny quirky moments . Buy this one in hardback, you will want to read again." Read more

"...is not your typical male character, Tyler makes him realistic and humorous , even though his personality is a little dry and predictable, but I'm..." Read more

"...of the family and the foibles of Muriel (and Edward, the dog) are wryly amusing and the combined quirkiness of all the characters drew you in to..." Read more

"...the usual romance tropes, this delightful novel delights and entertains at every turn . Highly recommended." Read more

Customers find the tone captivating, clever, engrossing, refreshing, heartwarming, and satisfying. They also say the book has a real message for the current political climate and an extraordinary view of ordinary people.

"...It wasn't challenging but it was engrossing . The story flowed convincingly and the characters were well constructed and their actions believable...." Read more

"... Rich in observation and free of the usual romance tropes, this delightful novel delights and entertains at every turn. Highly recommended." Read more

"...Her carefree and careless ways changes Macon's life.There are heartwarming , touching prose...." Read more

"...present some unusual characters and still make them believable and interesting . I might have given it 5 stars if it wasn't required reading." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book. Some find it quick and light, while others say it's slow and hard to read.

"...As many of the other reviews stated, it was extremely slow and boring in the beginning... well...it never got anything beyond extremely slow and..." Read more

"...A great, quick read ." Read more

"...Typos and jarring formatting make it almost impossible to read ...." Read more

"At first the book was hard to read but as I went along it became very interesting...." Read more

Customers find the plot complexity of the book not particularly interesting, hard to follow, and disjointed. They also say the situations are too unbelievable and discordant.

"...many of the other reviews stated, it was extremely slow and boring in the beginning ... well...it never got anything beyond extremely slow and boring...." Read more

"...Was so annoyed I wanted to throw it in the trash. Waste of money ." Read more

"...There is not redeeming value in his decisions , no hope, no future and no moral values. I would not recommend the book." Read more

"...I have read this book several times and it never disappoints . The read is much better than the movie, though very similar." Read more

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The Accidental Tourist: A Novel

By Anne Tyler

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Average rating: 7.12

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The Accidental Tourist

56 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-16

Chapters 17-20

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Chapters 17-20 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 17 summary.

Muriel tells Macon about the man she was seeing before him. She helped that man get his life together, and he left her to elope with another woman shortly after. Macon finds his thoughts wandering to Sarah from time to time in little moments while taking Edward out or while listening to Claire rant about her relationships. 

Macon and Muriel walk to the thrift stores and encounter Dominick’s mother, who asks if they’ve seen him. She worries about him staying out all night and talks about how he doesn’t drive safely when he has Muriel’s car. While thrifting, Muriel brings up going to France with Macon, which is his next trip after Canada. Macon hesitates because of the cost. When he mentions she’d need to take time off, Muriel reveals that she left her job at the vet. Macon becomes upset with Muriel, who justifies her decision because Macon has taken on a lot of financial responsibility for them anyway. Muriel eventually assures Macon that she can take care of herself.

Related Titles

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Clock Dance

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Valentine's Day Reads: The Theme of Love

The Accidental Tourist

by Anne Tyler

The accidental tourist summary and analysis of chapters four, five, and six.

Chapter Four opens with Macon waking up to a phone call and dreaming that it is Ethan calling him. When his phone rings again and he wakes up for real, he is disappointed to realize it is not Ethan but rather his boss calling him. His boss, Julian, asks when he can expect the manuscript for his new travel guide, and Macon answers flatly that it will take him a while to organize. Over the next few weeks, Macon stalls on writing his guidebook and instead takes to reorganizing the house with “new systems.”

Neighbors start to call Macon and invite him to dinner, having found out that Sarah left him. Despite their warmth, Macon feels that his neighbors are strangers to him. Sarah always liked crowds and had been social, until the last year of their marriage, when she became more isolated, especially after the death of Ethan. Sarah and Macon met at a mixer party in 1958, when they were 17 years old. Macon, seeing Sarah from afar, had believed she was unattainable. Sarah perceived Macon as looking “stuck-up” when they first met.

As a teenager, Macon lived with his grandparents and his grandfather would drive Sarah and Macon around, often embarrassing him. Macon went off to college at Princeton, where he missed Sarah. They reunited the next summer and had their first sexual encounter. The spring they graduated from college, they got married. Macon got a job at a factory while Sarah taught English at a private school.

Back in the present, Macon is trying to work on his travel guide. It is the end of August, nearing his deadline, and he is only at the introduction. He receives a call from Muriel, who asks about Edward and tries to set up a date with Macon under the guise of training the dog. Macon turns her down. In September, Macon’s mental health declines. He comes up with a new “system” of dressing, wearing sweatsuits all the time. Resistant to leaving the house, Macon orders groceries to be delivered but ends up ranting to the grocery clerk instead.

One night, Macon falls in the basement after trying to help the dog down the stairs. He ends up breaking his leg and goes to his family’s house to recover. There, he lives with his sister Rose and his brothers Porter and Charles, who are also divorced. Macon thinks back to how his grandfather commissioned a portrait of him and his siblings. This was when his mother, Alicia , was still part of the children’s lives. He recalls how his mother was always changing and acting erratically, such as dating different men. Eventually, she decided to marry a new man and sent her children to live with their grandparents in Baltimore. After moving in with their grandparents, Alicia only occasionally came to see the children, usually bringing gifts and remarking how “stodgy” the children grew to be, claiming they took after their father in that regard.

Macon feels disconnected with the outside world, having informed neither Sarah nor his boss Julian about his injury. One day, Macon’s former neighbor, Garner, comes to the Leary family house. He was worried after seeing Macon’s mail piling up and thought that he might have died. Garner encourages him to get back together with Sarah, but Macon does not want to hear it. Garner points out that after Ethan’s death, Macon always refused help from his neighbors, who were eager to assist him in his time of need. Garner also informs him that Muriel has come looking for him while he has been away.

In October, Macon’s boss Julian visits him at the family house to check up on the project. Julian has only received the first 2 chapters from Macon and is worried about him. Macon is forced to tell Julian about his broken leg and his separation from Sarah. Macon thinks back to how he first met Julian, after Julian read Macon’s freelance piece about a crafts fair in Washington and proposed the idea of writing travel guides for people who hate to travel.

As Julian leaves, Edward the dog becomes very aggressive and bites Macon on the hand. His siblings suggest that Macon give Edward away, as he is too much of a nuisance. Macon says that he can’t, thinking about how Edward once belonged to Ethan. Macon says he perhaps will contact the animal hospital to sign Edward up for training classes, but he keeps putting it off. Over the next few days, Edward continues to act out, biting and lunging at people. Finally, Macon decides to call Muriel.

Muriel is delighted to hear from Macon and says she can help train Edward—she will even charge him half the price she usually charges people. This confuses Macon, who has not quite picked up on the fact that Muriel has taken a liking to him. They make an appointment for the next day. Macon’s siblings are surprised that he is making the effort to train Edward.

In these chapters, we see the character of Macon undergo challenging changes in his life. The tragic death of his son and his separation from his wife of 20 years are momentous events that he has not truly learned to deal with, and thus he compensates for his emotional crisis by becoming even more rigid in his organizational “systems”—systems which are actually so nonsensical that they only cause Macon and his pets more difficulty. This is reflected in the way that Macon ends up breaking his leg after trying to get the dog to go downstairs to eat as part of his new feeding system.

This injury is the climax of a steady decline in Macon’s mental health. Macon’s personality is one that already tends to isolate himself from outside support, as alluded to by his neighbor Garner's disappointment that Macon refuses help after the death of his son. With the added stress of grief, what were once peculiar tendencies have morphed into something even more harmful for his well-being, where he cuts himself off completely from the external world. This is demonstrated in Macon’s refusal to go outside for grocery shopping and his nasty rant aimed at an innocent store clerk on the phone. We can observe that Macon at least retains some self-awareness of his condition, such as when he thinks to himself, after looking in the mirror, that he seems like “a patient in a mental hospital.” This self-consciousness is perhaps the only factor preventing Macon from becoming totally immersed in his own anxiety and eccentric habits.

In this way, his broken leg is a blessing, as it brings Macon out of his isolation to spend time with his family. By getting to know his siblings—Rose, Charles, and Porter—the reader begins to understand Macon better. Like Macon, his siblings are equally obsessed with strict and eccentric systems of organization, such as alphabetizing the food in the kitchen. We learn some of the Leary family history, like the way their mother behaved very erratically, always moving homes and dating different men, eventually leaving the 4 children to live with their grandparents. Thus it can be inferred that the instability of their early life produced adults like Macon and his siblings, who live by imposing tight control over their surroundings.

With all the unfortunate circumstances in Macon’s life—the loss of a child, a broken leg, a divorce, a lack of motivation for his work—the reader is made to wonder if he will succumb to the difficulty or rise up to embrace change. One opportunity for change presented to Macon is through the presence of Muriel, the dog trainer who works at the animal hospital and who has taken a major interest in Macon. For now, it seems Macon is totally resistant to engaging in any relationship with her beyond the practical necessity of training Edward. All he can do is compare Muriel to Sarah, noting the difference in their voices and their manner of speech. However, the way Muriel keeps reappearing in the story foreshadows that she will be playing an important role in the plot, providing an opportunity for Macon to get out of his routine comfort zone.

On one level, Macon desires change, yet on another level, he is having trouble leaving the past behind. We can see through his thoughts and dreams that he is still very much immersed in memories of Sarah and Ethan. It is particularly hard to break away from his former wife because she was Macon’s first and only love; they originally got together when they were teenagers. And reminders of Ethan appear to Macon in the most surprising of places, such as the painted portrait of Macon and his siblings, where he can see Ethan’s smile in his own, or even in Edward the dog, who was once Ethan’s beloved pet.

The narrator continues to flesh out the characters through physical descriptions, with lots of small details that reveal important personality traits. For example in Chapter 4, Tyler paints a picture of Macon and Sarah in high school. Their choice of outfits— Macon in a black turtleneck, and Sarah in something pink— is a seemingly minute description that actually reveals much about the characters' developmental stages. Macon’s coolness continues to the present tense of the novel, where his standoffish behavior has led to his current difficult life situations. Macon is aware of his cold temperament, and yet he has no idea how else to be.

The Accidental Tourist Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Accidental Tourist is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Standing water in the road is compared to a wide lake.

A wide lake, it seemed, in the center of the highway crashed against the underside of the car and slammed it to the right.

How does Macon meet Muriel?

Macon meets Muriel when he hires her to train his dog.

How is Macon described in Chapter 1?

From the text:

He was a tall, pale, gray-eyed man, with straight fair hair cut close to his head, and his skin was that thin kind that easily burns.

Study Guide for The Accidental Tourist

The Accidental Tourist study guide contains a biography of Anne Tyler, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Accidental Tourist
• The Accidental Tourist Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Accidental Tourist

The Accidental Tourist essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler.

• The Accidental Acceptance: Family and Modernity in 'The Accidental Tourist' and 'Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant'

Lesson Plan for The Accidental Tourist

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Accidental Tourist
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Accidental Tourist Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Accidental Tourist

• Introduction