On one level, [Morgan's Passing is about a] disturbed man, a man "who had gone to pieces," or who had "arrived unassembled." Gower Morgan, the novel's protagonist, is … someone who, for lack of an identity of his own, impersonates a ragtag assortment of selves. The actual circumstances of his life are ordinary with a vengeance….

The interplay of a drab, mediocre reality and of second-rate fantasies is an intriguing theme. It suggests what happens to the needs of the spirit when they have no outlet for expression; it hints at the comedy of an imagination without style, a madness without panache. The unlovely, prosaic texture of the protagonists' lives is best conveyed through masterfully detailed descriptions of urban landscapes and of commonplace objects. (p. 38)

But, like the disjointed tidbits of Morgan's house, or the fragmented elements of his character, the various pieces of the novel, although intriguing in themselves, simply refuse to jell, focus, or add up. Morgan's dissatisfaction is so without contours, his perceptions and flights of fancy so vapid and lacking in energy, that it is difficult to sympathize with his condition, or to understand why Emily, after an ardorless courtship, decides to leave Leon and marry Morgan. Because Morgan's peculiarity seems without purpose, it drives the reader to ask the most naive questions: What's wrong with him? What does he want? Why doesn't he do something? In fact, all the protagonists of Morgan's Passing are separated from their alienated, eccentric, or neurotic brethren who so thickly populate the pages of modern fiction by their lukewarm emotional temperature, the absence of delineation or intensity even in their pain. They are too lethargic, too passive, and the novel remains suspended in a chilly, murky, ozone-thin limbo—a bit as if Flannery O'Connor were writing in a fog. Without an exploration that would make the characters more familiar, and without a perspective that would make their estrangement significant, Anne Tyler is left with a story about weirdness—and weirdness, as a novelistic subject, is simply not enough. (pp. 38-9)