Cultural Dessert

'Morgan's Passing' by Anne Tyler

25 February 2022

Anne Tyler is one of the great contemporary American novelists. I have long admired her understated masterpieces - which never stray far from Baltimore and focus almost exclusively on domestic family life but still manage to say so much about the world. It was fascinating to hear a rare interview with Anne Tyler on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 this week (you can listen at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0014p3b) just after I had finished reading her 1980 novel ‘Morgan’s Passing’. Having recently read her most recent (and possibly final) short novel ‘Redhead by the Side of the Road’ (reviewed here in October 2021) it was interesting to go back to this much earlier work. ‘Morgan’s Passing’ felt like a prototype for the books I think of as quintessential Anne Tyler, such as 'Noah's Compass' (reviewed here in May 2010), 'The Beginner's Goodbye' (reviewed here in March 2013), 'Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant' (reviewed here in July 2014) and 'A Spool of Blue Thread' (reviewed here in March 2015). All the familiar Anne Tyler elements are present but the structure of ‘Morgan’s Passing’ is a little more experimental. Morgan Gower, is a likeable but exasperating eccentric - a familiar Anne Tyler character but it is unusual that he is the main protagonist rather than an amusingly embarrassing peripheral family member. Morgan is a Walter Mitty-like daydreamer, endlessly slipping into fictional personas - entertaining to bystanders but infuriating to his wife. Also unusually, for Anne Tyler, the story spans 12 years, starting in the late 1960s. It’s an enjoyable tale but I found it hard to sympathise with Morgan and wondered whether the book would have worked better with his wife Bonny as the central character.

Labels: Books

posted by Robin Simpson @ 3:05 pm