THE INTENTIONAL TOURIST

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When the sheer dailiness of ordinary life seems terminally humdrum, who has not entertained the fantasy? Just cut and run. Go somewhere else, find a clean slate, and start over. And this time, try to get it right. That relatively few people actually follow up on this impulse may testify to the power of inertia or the naggings of conscience, or to some tedious combination of both.

Thanks to the magic of Anne Tyler's fiction, Delia Grinstead, the heroine of Ladder of Years (Knopf; 326 pages; $24), is largely freed from such constraints. Married straight out of high school to a doctor 15 years her senior, Delia now finds herself in a comfortable Baltimore home with three nearly grown children and no intelligible reasons for staying where she is. She reads paperback romances out of boredom and feels excluded from the fun. "She was," she tells herself, "a sad, tired, anxious, forty-year-old woman who hadn't had a champagne brunch in decades."

So, during her extended family's annual June sojourn at the Delaware shore, Delia takes a walk down the beach and veers right toward their rented cottage, where she hitches a ride with the roof repairman. Some time later, she gets out at a small inland town and sets about buying some clothes to substitute for her swim togs. After that, she must find food and a place to sleep. Larger questions, such as what on earth she thinks she is doing, are submerged in the search for necessities.

Novelists have not always been kind to runaway wives-Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, for example. But Tyler (whose novels include The Accidental Tourist and Morgan's Passing) again blesses her subject with a comic sensibility. The world of Ladder of Years is not one where acts produce serious moral consequences. Delia reads of her disappearance in the newspaper: "A slender, small-boned woman with curly fair or light-brown hair, Mrs. Grinstead stands 5'2" or possibly 5'5" and weighs either 90 or 110 pounds." Her understandable response: "For heaven's sake, hadn't anyone in her family ever looked at her?" And it doesn't take long before Delia acquires as many emotional obligations in her new life as she had been saddled with before.

An invitation to her daughter's wedding finally puts Delia on the spot. After nearly a year and a half on her own, will she be lured back to Baltimore for good? The suspense is enjoyable but not nearly as pleasing as watching Tyler skim so stylishly over the surface of some decidedly troubled waters. There is a sitcom quality to much of what goes on in Ladder of Years, but Tyler mixes some bitter with the sweet and leaves the laugh track to the reader.