50 States of Literature: Exploring in Maryland

Barnaby Gaitlin is the focus of Ann Tyler’s fourteenth and perhaps most endearing book, A Patchwork Planet. As a teenager, Barnaby’s need to connect with others led to his arrest for breaking and entering to snoop into neighbors’ photo albums. Now thirty and divorced, his work at Rent-A-Back, an assistance service for the elderly, provides him with the appreciation and understanding which his well-to-do family is unable to do. His work is the one bright point in his life until Sophia, his new girlfriend and possible “guardian angel,” enters the scene and revitalizes his burnout existence. Like all Tyler’s novels, Planet is set in Maryland. The quiet neighborhood outside of Baltimore serves to nestle Barnaby with its “big, tall spruce trees” and “damp, chilly feel” that leaves a permanent mist on car windows. More so than the land itself, however, the northeast crispness of Baltimore attitude, which leaves characters like Barnaby’s clients more satisfyingly prickly than cuddly, serves as the perfect setting for the struggles of a promising loser. “What I wanted to know was,” Barnaby asks, “couldn’t people change? Did they have to settle for just being who they were forever, from cradle to grave?” In the end, the grace he has been searching for reveals itself like the quilt of the earth which a patient has made: “makeshift and haphazard, clumsily crowded together, overlapping,” but “pretty in an offbeat unexpected way.”