Where angels tread

Writing to a formula - if it is a good one - probably has more advantages than pitfalls. It not only wins readers, but establishes their loyalty. The American domestic realist Anne Tyler, author of Earthly Possessions (1977), The Accidental Tourist (1985) and Breathing Lessons (1988), makes the ordinary compelling. She is unique, a moralist who teaches without preaching, while remaining in familiar territory. Her books raise expectations, even if they risk seeming predictable. Somehow she has taken the routine chaos, the banality and tiny details of real life and crafted them into art. Her prose is compact, uncluttered, and at times hovers on the conversational side of folksiness.

Few writers can claim as many fellow novelists and critics among her readers. Her approach is so simple, direct, deceptively everyday and unnervingly perceptive that the reader has no choice but to become involved in the stories she tells. Her characters are as flawed, as self-deluding and as indecisive as the rest of us. Many of them are caught in stalemate situations and dead relationships. There are no adventures. But there are resolutions - eventually.

A Patchwork Planet (Chatto & Windus, £15.99 in UK) is her fourteenth novel. And whereas her last Ladder of Years (1995) was disappointing and something of an unlucky number 13, this new book not only marks a fine return to form, but is a convincing excursion into the mind of a hapless if philosophical thirty-year-old man whose life is a mess. Barnaby Gaitlin used to be married, with a wife and a daughter and a house. Nowadays he lives in a rented room and spends his days working as a general home help and removal man for old people. Barnaby is seemingly perpetually on call for his clients, a cast of lonely old widowers and tough old ladies who love and value him, which is just as well, as his relatives see him as a hopeless case. His car keeps breaking down and his alarm clock fails to wake him. His clothes are a disaster: he tries to pass off his pyjama top as a plaid shirt but fails to fool his smug, successful brother. Small wonder that even his daughter is sick of his excuses.

Sympathy is central to Tyler's vision, yet she never allows this to dull her observation. For all her compassion and clear-sightedness, she also has a flair for deadpan comedy. Immensely shrewd, she is careful to avoid sentiment. In creating the character of Barnaby, she ensures that from the outset he seems intelligent, imaginative and self-aware, if not quite in control. Born into a comfortable family, he is conscious of his mother's social pretensions and has also not forgotten the price he paid for his forays into juvenile crime.

Curiosity has always been his major weakness. ". . . I used to break into houses and read people's private mail. Also photo albums. I had a real thing about photo albums. The other kids who broke in along with me, they'd be hunting car keys and cigarettes and booze. They'd be tearing through closets and cabinets all around me, while I sat on the sofa poring over somebody's weddings pictures. And even when I took stuff, it was always personal stuff. This little snow globe once from a nightstand in a girl's bedroom."

Dismissed by his former wife, the beautiful Natalie - who, clearly weary of the sight of him, has decided that "Maybe it would be better if you didn't come anymore" - Barnaby is in danger of completely losing his daughter. Meanwhile, in characteristic Tyler fashion, the apparently minor characters are being cleverly developed. Having made the point that despite his present fallen state her hero is not a waster, Tyler also bestows him with a few family traditions such as his great-grandfather's belief in angels as beings who are not only saviours but lovers as well.

Sophia, whom he meets as a result of a strange occurrence at a train station, seems to Barnaby the angel he has been seeking. She is so calm she is dangerously close to being passive. She is a banker, drives a Saab, is undemanding and always has a Crock Pot dinner at the ready. All she wants is Barnaby, faults and all. In fact, the more faults the better, as she enjoys demonstrating the extent of her forgiveness. His family love her and she is nice to his daughter. He falls in love and then falls out, brilliantly: "And her eternal Crock Pot dinners; oh Lord. If I had to eat one more stewy-tasting, mixed-and-mingled, gray-coloured one-dish meal, I'd croak! And her predictability: her Sunday-night shampoos . . . her even temper, her boring steadfastness, her self-congratulatory loyalty when she assumed I'd stolen from her aunt."

Such is Tyler's skill that although Barnaby's true love interest is obvious throughout, this does not weaken the story. His narrative voice also slides convincingly between optimism, regret and exasperation. He is a person who has had time to ponder his mistakes, which he does even as he seems about to make new ones. There is nothing simple about Barnaby's emotional life and Tyler makes it very believable. Another device she makes effective use of is Barnaby's touchiness. He may be good humoured and likable but Tyler never misses an opportunity to present his awareness of the slights and insults, both real and imaginary, that he suffers. Among several fine comic set pieces is a Thanksgiving supper which provides the scene for extensive truth-telling. The portrayal of bickering families has always been one of Tyler's strengths, and A Patchwork Planet is sustained by Gaitlin family disputes, ancient and otherwise, most of which involve Barnaby. As the meal - blighted by the absence of a turkey due to a misunderstanding - drags on, Barnaby notices that "the Pilgrim candles were headless now, their shoulders curly-edged bowls of wax. They looked like torture victims." The fragmented conversation continues until, as he reports, "the telephone rang. We were all so relieved that every last one of us stirred as if to go answer it, but Mom picked it up in the kitchen."

At her best as in Earthly Possessions, Anne Tyler can lay open a life, its pain and regrets, with formidable power. Wives, such as Charlotte in that novel, prepare to leave their husbands in order to salvage their lives. Her characters are presented as living in the present while also remaining tied to their pasts. The natural speech, ordinary confusions and commonplace observations are not devised to offset the profundity of what she is saying. They are deliberately called upon to highlight it. A Patchwork Planet, with its wealth of subtle symbols and metaphors, is ultimately a surprisingly sombre exploration of life and death and truth approached with Tyler's comforting if unsettlingly honest vision.