Mar 22, 2010
Although Anne Tyler had previously used male protagonists in her fiction, until A Patchwork Planet she had never had a male first-person narrator. However, since the novel is about Barnaby Gaitlin's discovery of his own identity, the author's decision to let Barnaby tell his own story was a wise one.
A Patchwork Planet begins on New Year's Eve and ends on the following Christmas. Whenever the socially prominent Gaitlins have one of their ceremonial gatherings, they make it clear that they are ashamed of Barnaby. In his youth, he was arrested for housebreaking and...
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