Summary
Chapter Four opens with Macon waking up to a phone call and dreaming that it is Ethan calling him. When his phone rings again and he wakes up for real, he is disappointed to realize it is not Ethan but rather his boss calling him. His boss, Julian, asks when he can expect the manuscript for his new travel guide, and Macon answers flatly that it will take him a while to organize. Over the next few weeks, Macon stalls on writing his guidebook and instead takes to reorganizing the house with “new systems.”
Neighbors start to call Macon and invite him to dinner, having found out that Sarah left him. Despite their warmth, Macon feels that his neighbors are strangers to him. Sarah always liked crowds and had been social, until the last year of their marriage, when she became more isolated, especially after the death of Ethan. Sarah and Macon met at a mixer party in 1958, when they were 17 years old. Macon, seeing Sarah from afar, had believed she was unattainable. Sarah perceived Macon as looking “stuck-up” when they first met.
As a teenager, Macon lived with his grandparents and his grandfather would drive Sarah and Macon around, often embarrassing him. Macon went off to college at Princeton, where he missed Sarah. They reunited the next summer and had their first sexual encounter. The spring they graduated from college, they got married. Macon got a job at a factory while Sarah taught English at a private school.
Back in the present, Macon is trying to work on his travel guide. It is the end of August, nearing his deadline, and he is only at the introduction. He receives a call from Muriel, who asks about Edward and tries to set up a date with Macon under the guise of training the dog. Macon turns her down. In September, Macon’s mental health declines. He comes up with a new “system” of dressing, wearing sweatsuits all the time. Resistant to leaving the house, Macon orders groceries to be delivered but ends up ranting to the grocery clerk instead.
One night, Macon falls in the basement after trying to help the dog down the stairs. He ends up breaking his leg and goes to his family’s house to recover. There, he lives with his sister Rose and his brothers Porter and Charles, who are also divorced. Macon thinks back to how his grandfather commissioned a portrait of him and his siblings. This was when his mother, Alicia, was still part of the children’s lives. He recalls how his mother was always changing and acting erratically, such as dating different men. Eventually, she decided to marry a new man and sent her children to live with their grandparents in Baltimore. After moving in with their grandparents, Alicia only occasionally came to see the children, usually bringing gifts and remarking how “stodgy” the children grew to be, claiming they took after their father in that regard.
Macon feels disconnected with the outside world, having informed neither Sarah nor his boss Julian about his injury. One day, Macon’s former neighbor, Garner, comes to the Leary family house. He was worried after seeing Macon’s mail piling up and thought that he might have died. Garner encourages him to get back together with Sarah, but Macon does not want to hear it. Garner points out that after Ethan’s death, Macon always refused help from his neighbors, who were eager to assist him in his time of need. Garner also informs him that Muriel has come looking for him while he has been away.
In October, Macon’s boss Julian visits him at the family house to check up on the project. Julian has only received the first 2 chapters from Macon and is worried about him. Macon is forced to tell Julian about his broken leg and his separation from Sarah. Macon thinks back to how he first met Julian, after Julian read Macon’s freelance piece about a crafts fair in Washington and proposed the idea of writing travel guides for people who hate to travel.
As Julian leaves, Edward the dog becomes very aggressive and bites Macon on the hand. His siblings suggest that Macon give Edward away, as he is too much of a nuisance. Macon says that he can’t, thinking about how Edward once belonged to Ethan. Macon says he perhaps will contact the animal hospital to sign Edward up for training classes, but he keeps putting it off. Over the next few days, Edward continues to act out, biting and lunging at people. Finally, Macon decides to call Muriel.
Muriel is delighted to hear from Macon and says she can help train Edward—she will even charge him half the price she usually charges people. This confuses Macon, who has not quite picked up on the fact that Muriel has taken a liking to him. They make an appointment for the next day. Macon’s siblings are surprised that he is making the effort to train Edward.
Analysis
In these chapters, we see the character of Macon undergo challenging changes in his life. The tragic death of his son and his separation from his wife of 20 years are momentous events that he has not truly learned to deal with, and thus he compensates for his emotional crisis by becoming even more rigid in his organizational “systems”—systems which are actually so nonsensical that they only cause Macon and his pets more difficulty. This is reflected in the way that Macon ends up breaking his leg after trying to get the dog to go downstairs to eat as part of his new feeding system.
This injury is the climax of a steady decline in Macon’s mental health. Macon’s personality is one that already tends to isolate himself from outside support, as alluded to by his neighbor Garner's disappointment that Macon refuses help after the death of his son. With the added stress of grief, what were once peculiar tendencies have morphed into something even more harmful for his well-being, where he cuts himself off completely from the external world. This is demonstrated in Macon’s refusal to go outside for grocery shopping and his nasty rant aimed at an innocent store clerk on the phone. We can observe that Macon at least retains some self-awareness of his condition, such as when he thinks to himself, after looking in the mirror, that he seems like “a patient in a mental hospital.” This self-consciousness is perhaps the only factor preventing Macon from becoming totally immersed in his own anxiety and eccentric habits.
In this way, his broken leg is a blessing, as it brings Macon out of his isolation to spend time with his family. By getting to know his siblings—Rose, Charles, and Porter—the reader begins to understand Macon better. Like Macon, his siblings are equally obsessed with strict and eccentric systems of organization, such as alphabetizing the food in the kitchen. We learn some of the Leary family history, like the way their mother behaved very erratically, always moving homes and dating different men, eventually leaving the 4 children to live with their grandparents. Thus it can be inferred that the instability of their early life produced adults like Macon and his siblings, who live by imposing tight control over their surroundings.
With all the unfortunate circumstances in Macon’s life—the loss of a child, a broken leg, a divorce, a lack of motivation for his work—the reader is made to wonder if he will succumb to the difficulty or rise up to embrace change. One opportunity for change presented to Macon is through the presence of Muriel, the dog trainer who works at the animal hospital and who has taken a major interest in Macon. For now, it seems Macon is totally resistant to engaging in any relationship with her beyond the practical necessity of training Edward. All he can do is compare Muriel to Sarah, noting the difference in their voices and their manner of speech. However, the way Muriel keeps reappearing in the story foreshadows that she will be playing an important role in the plot, providing an opportunity for Macon to get out of his routine comfort zone.
On one level, Macon desires change, yet on another level, he is having trouble leaving the past behind. We can see through his thoughts and dreams that he is still very much immersed in memories of Sarah and Ethan. It is particularly hard to break away from his former wife because she was Macon’s first and only love; they originally got together when they were teenagers. And reminders of Ethan appear to Macon in the most surprising of places, such as the painted portrait of Macon and his siblings, where he can see Ethan’s smile in his own, or even in Edward the dog, who was once Ethan’s beloved pet.
The narrator continues to flesh out the characters through physical descriptions, with lots of small details that reveal important personality traits. For example in Chapter 4, Tyler paints a picture of Macon and Sarah in high school. Their choice of outfits— Macon in a black turtleneck, and Sarah in something pink— is a seemingly minute description that actually reveals much about the characters' developmental stages. Macon’s coolness continues to the present tense of the novel, where his standoffish behavior has led to his current difficult life situations. Macon is aware of his cold temperament, and yet he has no idea how else to be.
