SOURCE: Stovel, Nora Foster. Review of A Patchwork Planet, by Anne Tyler. International Fiction Review (January 2001): 120.

In the following review, Stovel deems The Patchwork Planet “an amusing and enlightening odyssey.”

Tyler, author of over a dozen novels and dozens of stories, may be the best novelist writing in the United States in recent decades. Her latest novel, A Patchwork Planet (originally published by Viking), is true to the tradition of her best-known works: The Accidental Tourist (1985; filmed 1988), Breathing Lessons (1988; televised 1994), and Saint Maybe (1991; televised 1998). Admired for her ironic portraits of eccentric characters and dysfunctional families, Tyler turns her sense of the extraordinary nature of ordinary people on certain denizens of her own town of Baltimore in A Patchwork Planet.

Every family has its black sheep. But when that family is the Gaitlin Foundation of Baltimore, the family failure is a black sheep in spades. Bad enough that Barnaby...