Editing The Accidental Tourist (section)

==Reception==

In ''[[The New York Times]]'', [[Larry McMurtry]] says, "Tyler shows, with a fine clarity, the mingling of misery and contentment in the daily lives of her families, reminds us how alike—and yet distinct—happy and unhappy families can be. Muriel Pritchett is as appealing a woman as Miss Tyler has created; and upon the quiet Macon she lavishes the kind of intelligent consideration that he only intermittently gets from his own womenfolk".<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/19/specials/tyler-tourist.html|title=Life is a Foreign Country|newspaper=The New York Times|access-date=April 28, 2013}}</ref>

[[Michiko Kakutani]] wrote, "It is from just such private lives that Miss Tyler herself has spun her own minutely detailed art, rendering them with such warmth and fidelity that her readers, too, are startled into a new appreciation of the ordinary and mundane. Like [[John Updike]], she has taken as her fictional territory that sprawling American landscape of the middle class, and in 10 novels now, she has claimed as her special province the family in all its contrary dimensions."<ref>Kakutani, Michiko (August 28, 1985)[https://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/28/books/books-of-the-times-219259.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A10%22%7D] "Books of the Times," ''New York Times''</ref>

In contrast to most critics, John Blades, in the ''[[Chicago Tribune]]'', wrote a scathing review: "In an age of dissonant, aggressive fiction, Tyler has established herself as a voice of sweet reason, the heiress apparent to [[Eudora Welty]] as the earth mother of American writers.  For all Tyler's seductive qualities—the great charm and coziness of her fictional universe, her compassion for misfits, and, not least, her soothing, almost tranquilizing voice—there is something annoyingly synthetic about the work itself. However wise and wonderful, her fiction is seriously diluted by the promiscuous use of artificial sweeteners, a practice that has made Tyler our foremost NutraSweet novelist."<ref>Blades, John (July 20, 1986)[https://www.chicagotribune.com/1986/07/20/for-nutrasweet-fiction-tyler-takes-the-cake/] “For Nutrasweet Fiction, Tyler Takes the Cake,” ''Chicago Tribune''</ref>

[[Edward Hoagland]] wrote in the ''New York Times'', "Macon Leary, the magnificently decent yet ''ordinary'' man in ''The Accidental Tourist,'' follows logic to its zany conclusions, and in doing this justifies...the catch-as-catch-can nature of much of life, making us realize that we are probably missing people of mild temperament in our own acquaintance who are heroes, too, if we had Ms. Tyler's eye for recognizing them....Muriel, the man-chaser and man-saver of ''The Accidental Tourist,'' ranks among the more endearing characters of postwar literature."<ref>Hoagland, Edward (September 11, 1988)[https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/11/books/about-maggie-who-tried-too-hard.html?pagewanted=1] "About Maggie, Who Tried Too Hard," ''New York Times''</ref>