Anne Tyler, like many writers of history, illustrates the ills and challenges of society by homing in on its microcosm: the family unit. Of her more than 20 novels, most of them deal with the complexities of relationships, the repetitive patterns of families, and how the people within them deal with daily life. This focus is on display in The Accidental Tourist, where Tyler gives the reader an intricate look at both the Leary family and the Pritchett family, revealing their idiosyncrasies and deeply ingrained behaviors that are almost as hardwired as their shared physical attributes. In particular, we see the characters wrestle between two options: that of perpetuating the familiar, and that of making a true change in themselves. In the Leary family, for instance, all four siblings have adopted a similar tendency of needing to control their surroundings; a result of a chaotic childhood with a single mother who neglected them, never providing a stable home for her children.
Literary critic Mary Ellis Gibson suggests in her paper Family as Fate: The Novels of Anne Tyler that Tyler's characters find themselves somewhere between two poles of "human caring and nihilism," alternately trying to escape their family upbringings and sinking deeper into "their inherited predispositions." Gibson names novels such as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Searching for Caleb as examples of where Tyler has illustrated how families coalesce around a common attitude towards life; even if they are not made conscious of it, they become fated to make the same mistakes as their parents and grandparents. We can draw the same conclusions about The Accidental Tourist, where Tyler depicts the Leary siblings as tightly bonded through their mutual eccentric habits, something they have developed in response to a trauma that they have yet to confront.
The writer Nasrullah Mambrol argues that Anne Tyler's characters' difficulty embracing the changes of life comes from a fear of commitment and all that it represents. He analyzes the novel The Tin Can Tree, where the characters "struggle to remain committed in the face of significant loss." Macon Leary similarly breaks down after the death of his son Ethan and the separation from his wife Sarah, resisting any new and helpful influences until Muriel Pritchett forces her way into his life. And then there are Macon's siblings—Rose, Porter, and Charles—who have all ended up as single adults living together in their grandfather's house because they are so cautious about committing to anything that will break them out of well-worn familial patterns. Yet, despite their strangeness, Tyler presents a non-judgmental view of her families, portraying the raw human experience with precision and compassion.
