"Morgan's Passing" is a narrative replete with colorful and idiosyncratic detail, precise in its tenderness. And yet, for all its intentness of specification, the book—like its subject, Morgan Gower—eludes and continues to elude one. The reader stalks Morgan as Morgan stalks Emily and, always, Morgan is just barely out of reach, turning the corner or dipping into some doorway or flattening against a wall, as fugitive and remittent as the refrain from a song one can't forget yet can't quite remember….

[The] novel demands something deeper—not explanation, exactly, but penetration, a sense of intimate particularity. Morgan is so intriguing that he cries out for capture, an act of imaginative possession. What we have are suggestions—scattered moments and the blur of passage. Morgan remains a problem, and Anne Tyler's relation to Morgan is perhaps part of the problem. She seems at once too casually fond of Morgan to subject him to a truly loving, yet deeply probing scrutiny, and too beguiled by his disorderly charm to give us any outside perspective on him. (p. 14)

There is much to praise in Anne Tyler's eighth novel. This might have been the story of a midlife crisis, a familiar tale, with steady, reliable associations, however tormented; but Miss Tyler chose instead to depict an unfamiliar state of continual crisis, a condition for which there exist no charts or manuals ready to hand. And Miss Tyler has scrupulously adhered to a moderate tone, shunning sensationalism and easy emotion. Yet there is a cost. Intimacy and anguish are stinted in this novel and the loss is felt. The author's undeniable skill and her level of engagement seem at odds here. The title "Morgan's Passing" may well be a play on "passing on,"… but there are too many laughs all around and the sense of the book is of Morgan always just passing by, gliding by, far too blithely. (p. 33)