[The only question remaining about Anne Tyler's] talent is: Will it ever, in its scintillating display of plenitude, make a dent as deep in our national self-awareness and literature as that left by the work of O'Connor, and Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty? For Anne Tyler, in her gifts both of dreaming and of realizing, evokes comparison with these writers, and in her tone and subject matter seems deliberately to seek association with the Southern ambience that, in less cosmopolitan times, they naturally and inevitably breathed. Even their aura of regional isolation is imitated by Miss Tyler as she holds fast, in her imagination and in her person, to a Baltimore with only Southern exits, her characters, when they flee, never flee North…. The brand names, the fads, the bastardized vistas of our great homogenized nation glint out at us from her fiction with a cheerful authority; nor is there anything stunted about her emotional anthropology—daughterhood, motherhood, sorority, and espousal all find vivid embodiment among her characters, where men are as confidently presented as women, and the range of particularized types is as broad as any in contemporary fiction. Still, her books, their dazzlements subsided, leave an unsettling impression of having been writ in water, or with a cool laser of moonlight. Her latest novel, "Morgan's Passing" …, compounds the faults of her quicksilver virtues, for it has as its heroine a fabricator of puppets, and as hero a man whose life is a succession of poses, struck in a thick beard and an array of funny hats and costumes. If we suspected we were being toyed with before, we know it now.

Halfway through the book, however, with the grudging paragraph above already assembling in the reviewer's head, there came a scene, of a messed-up family plowing through a summer weekend at a tacky beach house on the Delaware shore, that a reader would have to be heartless not to love and admire…. It is by means of faithfully, modestly rendering life's minute ups and downs, its damp and sunny patches, and its trailing wisps of meaninglessness that Anne Tyler expresses her sense of reality. "Morgan's Passing" is a novel without a crisis…. [It] concerns the union of a man and a woman achieved in an unpropitious world, out of unlikely beginnings; but when Emily and Morgan confront their particular dragon—the married state they are both already in—the dragon does not so much fall as melt away, as their spouses obligingly accede and a shifted cast of characters resumes life much as it was before: fitful, zany, wistful, tender, and somehow hollow. (pp. 97-8)

Though we are admitted to Morgan's head now and then, we never hear him talking to himself in the level, calculating voice that would make his "act" plausible, as the strategy of a sane masculine person…. [Miss Tyler's first novel, "If Morning Ever Comes"] is prodigiously skillful, and calm in its skills; nothing of the virtuoso manipulator disturbs its steady and finally moving delineation of a marital commitment as it grows within a young man who, like Morgan (and like Hugh), doesn't quite know who he is. We feel—in the phrase of Warner Berthoff, in his rueful study of postwar American writing "A Literature Without Qualities"—"that the writer's own most intimate apprehension of life stands directly behind everything presented." The most intimate apprehension behind "Morgan's Passing" seems to be a jauntily oblique unease about puppetry, fiction, and the like.

Still, what a magical puppeteer this writer remains! She snaps her minor characters onto the stage with a verve that makes us laugh…. With no obvious faith and no apparent paranoia to give her vision impetus, Anne Tyler continues to look close, and to fabricate, out of the cardboard and Magic Markers available to the festive imagination, images of the illusory lives we lead. More than that it would be unkind to ask, did we not imagine, from the scope of the gift displayed, that something of that gift is still being withheld. (pp. 100-01)