Excerpts-

• From the cover Chapter 1
   
  You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer. He lives alone; he keeps to himself; his routine is etched in stone. At seven fifteen every morning you see him set out on his run. Along about ten or ten thirty he slaps the magnetic TECH HERMIT sign onto the roof of his Kia. The times he leaves on his calls will vary, but not a day seems to go by without several clients requiring his services. Afternoons he can be spot- ted working around the apartment building; he moonlights as the super. He’ll be sweeping the walk or shaking out the mat or conferring with a plumber. Monday nights, before trash day, he hauls the garbage bins to the alley; Wednesday nights, the recycling bins. At ten p.m. or so the three squinty windows behind the foundation plantings go dark. (His apartment is in the basement. It is probably not very cheery.)
   
   
  He’s a tall, bony man in his early forties with not-so-good posture—head lunging slightly forward, shoulders slightly hunched. Jet-black hair, but when he neglects to shave for a day his whiskers have started coming in gray. Blue eyes, heavy eyebrows, hollows in his cheeks. A clamped-looking mouth. Unvarying outfit of jeans and a T-shirt or a sweat- shirt, depending on the season, with a partially-erased- looking brown leather jacket when it’s really cold. Scuffed brown round-toed shoes that seem humble, like a school-boy’s shoes. Even his running shoes are plain old dirty-white sneakers—none of the fluorescent stripes and gel-filled soles and such that most runners favor—and his shorts are knee- length denim cutoffs.
   
  He has a girlfriend, but they seem to lead fairly separate lives. You see her heading toward his back door now and then with a sack of takeout; you see them setting forth on a weekend morning in the Kia, minus the TECH HERMIT sign. He doesn’t appear to have male friends. He is cordial to the tenants but no more than that. They call out a greeting when they meet up with him and he nods amiably and raises a hand, often not troubling to speak. Nobody knows if he has family.
   
  The apartment building’s in Govans—a small, three- story brick cube east of York Road in north Baltimore, with a lake-trout joint on the right and a used-clothing store on the left. Tiny parking lot out back. Tiny plot of grass in front. An incongruous front porch—just a concrete slab stoop, really—with a splintery wooden porch swing that nobody ever sits in, and a vertical row of doorbells next to the dingy white door.
   
  Does he ever stop to consider his life? The meaning of it, the point? Does it trouble him to think that he will probably spend his next thirty or forty years this way? Nobody knows. And it’s almost certain nobody’s ever asked him.
   
   
  On a Monday toward the end of October, he was still eating breakfast when his first call came in. Usually his morning went: a run, a shower, then breakfast, and then a little tidy- ing up. He hated it when something interrupted the nor- mal progression. He pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the screen: EMILY PRESCOTT. An old lady; he had dealt with her often enough that her name was in his directory. Old ladies had the easiest problems to fix but the greatest number of fractious questions. They always wanted to know why. “How come this happened?” they would ask. “Last night when I went to bed my computer was just fine and this morning it’s all kerblooey. But I didn’t do a thing to it! I was sound asleep!”
   
  “Yeah, well, never mind, now I’ve got it...

Reviews-

• 

  January 13, 2020
  A fastidious everyman weathers a spate of relationship stresses in this compassionate, perceptive novel from Tyler (Clock Dance). Micah Mortimer, 43, makes house calls for his Tech Hermit business and moonlights as the superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, where the residents observe his regimented routine and wonder, through Tyler’s gossip-inflected narration, “Does he ever stop to consider his life?”
  The disruptions begin with a call from his schoolteacher girlfriend, Cassia Slade, who is in a panic because she is facing eviction. Then college freshman Brink Adams shows up on his stoop and claims to be his son. Micah knows it isn’t true, because he never slept with Brink’s mother, Lorna, an old girlfriend, but he tolerates the languid, starry-eyed kid who claims to look up to him for living a working-class life and who fixated on a photo of Micah kept by Lorna. After Micah tries to put Brink in touch with Lorna, he disappears. When Cassia dumps him for not immediately offering to let her move in, Micah descends into a funk that just might push him to prove himself worthy of her companionship. While Micah’s cool indifference occasionally feels like a symptom of Tyler’s spare, detached style, his moments of growth bring satisfaction. This quotidian tale of a late bloomer goes down easy. Agent: Jesseca Salky, Salky Literary Management.

• Tyler's latest audiobook is a small novel about Micah Mortimer, a bachelor fussbudget in his mid-40s who is reevaluating his life. Although narrator MacLeod Andrews has a tendency to replace commas with periods when introducing dialogue, he gives the diverse cast of characters unique voices. Micah, the youngest child and only son in a family with four older sisters, has a detached tone. He sounds patient with the tenants of the apartment building he manages and with the clients of his Tech Wizard business. Andrews also captures the admiration and amazement of the Travel Gods who live in Micah's head and complement his every move while driving. Brink, the young man who appears at his door thinking Micah is his father, sounds like the floundering, frustrated teenager he is. This is a small novel with a big heart. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

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