In the paradoxical character of Emily, at once passive and inflexible, ruthless in her rejections and unswerving in her loyalty, Tyler has created [in Morgan's Passing] the kissing cousin to Charlotte Emory, the heroine of her last novel, Earthly Possessions. Both women achieve spiritual freedom in circumstances of poverty and psychological subjection; both are dutiful victims, not of the sexist gargoyles grimacing from the pages of so many recent novels, but of entirely ordinary men of limited competence and probity. Because "average" people don't usually make for large drama or high comedy, they are much less common in fiction than in real life. Perhaps it is Anne Tyler's most uncommon accomplishment that she can make such characters interesting and amusing without violating their limitations.

Happily, despite the novel's portending title, Morgan survives his reordering, not wholly intact but in all his essentials, and one finishes the book with a quiet hurrah for human nature. Not since Garp have I come across a character in a recent novel who is at once so plausibly flawed and so improbably lovable….

The flavor of the book is alternately lyrical and rambunctiously comic—as though Chekhov were to rewrite one of Kaufmann and Hart's comedies of confusion; as though Flannery O'Connor were to forget all about religion and write a whole novel as droll as her tales; as though Dickens were alive and well and living in Baltimore.

But even those wild hyperboles tell only half the story—Morgan's half. Emily, who has almost as much time center stage, is a quieter presence … but no less vivid. Her diffident devotion to the plainest truth reflects a similar bedrock simplicity in Tyler's prose—the other side of the coin to Morgan's (and his creator's) ebullient profusions. The effect of this synthesis is a totally believable fictive world with the concrete reality of a Manet and the radiant colors of a Matisse.