In this, her fourteenth novel--and one of her most endearing--Anne Tyler tells the story of a lovable loser who's trying to get his life in order.         Barnaby Gaitlin has been in trouble ever since adolescence. He had this habit of breaking into other people's houses. It wasn't the big loot he was after, like his teenage cohorts. It was just that he liked to read other people's mail, pore over their family photo albums, and appropriate a few of their precious mementos.         But for eleven years now, he's been working steadily for Rent-a-Back, renting his back to old folks and shut-ins who can't move their own porch furniture or bring the Christmas tree down from the attic. At last, his life seems to be on an even keel.         Still, the Gaitlins (of "old" Baltimore) cannot forget the price they paid for buying off Barnaby's former victims. And his ex-wife would just as soon he didn't show up ever to visit their little girl, Opal. Even the nice, steady woman (his guardian angel?) who seems to have designs on him doesn't fully trust him, it develops, when the chips are down, and it looks as though his world may fall apart again.         There is no one like Anne Tyler, with her sharp, funny, tender perceptions about how human beings navigate on a puzzling planet, and she keeps us enthralled from start to finish in this delicious new novel. Barnaby Gaitlin is one of Anne Tyler's most promising unpromising characters. At 30, he has yet to graduate from college, is already divorced, and is used to defeat. His mother thrives on reminding him of his adolescent delinquency and debt to his family, and even his daughter is fed up with his fecklessness. Still, attuned as he is to "the normal quota for misfortune," Barney is one of the star employees of Baltimore's Rent-a-Back, Inc., which pays him an hourly wage to help old people (and one young agoraphobe) run errands and sort out their basements and attics. Anne Tyler makes you admire most of these mothball eccentrics (though they're far from idealized) and hope that they can stave off nursing homes and death. There is, for example, "the unstoppable little black grandma whose children phoned us on an emergency basis whenever she threatened to overdo." And then there's Barnaby's new girlfriend's aunt, who will eventually accuse him of theft--"Over her forearm she carried a Yorkshire terrier, neatly folded like a waiter's napkin. 'This is my doorbell,' she said, thrusting him toward me. 'I'd never have known you were out here if not for Tatters.'" These people are wonderful creations, but their lives are more brittle than cuddly, Barnaby knows better than to think of them as friends, because they'll only die on him. Yet his job offers at least glimpses of roots and affection. Helping an old lady set up her Christmas tree (on New Year's Eve!) gives him the chance to hang a singular ornament--a snowflake "pancake-sized, slightly crumpled, snipped from gift wrap so old that the Santas were smoking cigarettes." And Barnaby himself is sharp and impatient at painful--and painfully funny--family dinners, apparently unable to keep his finger off the auto-self-destruct button every time his life improves. As much as his superb creator, he is a poet of disappointment, resignation, and minute transformation. --Kerry Fried Things are still quirky, sweet, funny, and wise in Tyler country, as once again, this beguiling novelist portrays seemingly placid characters on the verge of abrupt metamorphosis. Barnaby Gaitland, a 29-year-old threadbare nonconformist and the black sheep of an affluent Baltimore family, is locked in a perpetual cycle of resentment with his mother, who has never forgiven him for the embarrassment he caused her when he got caught breaking into their neighbor's home. This standoff, as well as his divorce, has contributed to Barnaby's disaffection from the adult world in general and his parents' world in particular. His father's family became exceedingly wealthy after his great-grandfather heeded the advice of an "angel," and now the Gaitlands, cold fish all, run a philanthropic foundation. Tyler has made altruism the axis on which this gentle tale spins as she contrasts the Gaitlands' writing checks for the "deserving poor" to Barnaby's regular performance of good deeds as an employee of Rent-a-Back. As he helps the elderly and the infirm and earns their adoration, Barnaby hopes for his angel and believes he has finally found her in Sophia, but even her kindness is tainted and superficial. As Tyler involves us in the minutiae of Barnaby's ragtag life, she offers piquant musings on old age, selfishness, the opaqueness of people's hearts, and the intractability of love. One of Barnaby's favorite clients, Mrs. Alford, has devoted years to making a quilt of "our planet" that is "makeshift and haphazard, clumsily cobbled together, overlapping and crowded and likely to fall to pieces at any moment," a perfect emblem of all our lives. Donna Seaman Lg. Prt. 0