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Title: Morgan's Passing by Anne Tyler ISBN: 0-449-91172-1 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 August, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.57 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A gem
Comment: Morgan's Passing is one of my top favorites of Anne Tyler's many books, perhaps because I'm a midwife, and the book contains one of the most hilarious, compassionate, and realistic childbirth scenes I've ever read. Morgan of the title delivers a baby in a car, and when he asks the guy to get some newspaper, the flustered fellow asks, "The Times, the Post, or the Trib??" or some such nonsense. And believe me, I know from experience that you just can't make that kind of stuff up. It's true, it's all true.
But back to the main theme. Morgan is a very odd and very irritating eccentric, married to a clearly long-suffering wife with whom he has seven children. All girls. Morgan works in a hardware store where he mostly tries to talk people out of buying the stock. Morgan talks and talks and talks and talks. And Morgan is going through a confusing slide into a mid life crisis.
It makes for some of Tyler's best writing - and for some of our best reading.
Rating: 5
Summary: A powerfully detailed and moving story of middle age
Comment: Anne Tyler's "Morgan's Passing" provides probably the most moving story of middle age I've ever read--not for any illness or newfound love of life or striking discoveries made by Morgan Gower, the main character, but because of the realistic way she shows him slipping into eccentricity and stodginess and fear of old age. Without giving away too much detail for those who haven't had the profound pleasure of reading this engrossing novel themselves, Morgan ends up grasping at something he thinks will make life different and boy, does it ever.
That makes this sound like a depressing novel, which it most certainly is not. Morgan and his wife, Bonny, are the parents of seven daughters, and the novel is a lively one filled with the fully three-dimensional, quirky, utterly human characters for which Tyler is justly famed. The underpinnings of the story are serious (what do you do when everything about your life is different from what you'd hoped or imagined?), but the novel itself has many hilarious moments. Witness Morgan in Cullen's Hardware Store, where he has worked forever and where he is absolutely no good with the customers:
Morgan had to rise and dust off his knees, regretfully, and wait on a man in coveralls who wanted to buy a Hide-A-Key. "What for?" Morgan asked. "Why spend good money on a little tin box? Do you see the price of this thing?"
"Well, but last week I locked the keys inside my car, don't you know, and I was thinking how maybe I could hide an extra key beneath the--"
"Look," said Morgan. "All you do is take a piece of dental floss, waxed. Surely you have dental floss. Thread your extra key on it, double it for strength, tie it to your radiator grille and ket the key hang down inside. Simple! Costs you nothing."
"Well, but this here Hide-A-Key--"
"Are you not standing in the presence of a man whose wife perpetually mislays his car keys for him?" Morgan asked. The man glanced around him. "ME, I mean. She loses all I own," Morgan said, "And I've never had a Hide-A-Key in my life."
"Well, still," the man said doggedly, "I think I'll just go ahead with this here."
"What is it?" Morgan asked. "You don't have dental floss? Never mind! I tell you what I'll do: you come back this same time tomorrow, I'll have a piece for you from home. Free, no charge. A gift. All right? I'll bring you in a yard or two."
"For Christ's sake," said the man, "will you let me buy one cruddy Hide-A-Key?"
Morgan flung his hands up. "Of course!" he said. "Be my guest! Waste your money! Fill your life with junk!" He stabbed the cash register keys. "A dollar twenty-nine," he said.
"It's MY dollar-twenty-nine, I'll waste it however I like," said the man, pressing the money into Morgan's palm. "Maniac."
"Junkie!"
There are many riches in "Morgan's Passing," and I highly recommend it to anyone who discovered Anne Tyler later in her career and hasn't yet indulged in her earlier works. This is a super book.
Rating: 4
Summary: I liked Morgan and his story...
Comment: This novel follows an eccentric named Morgan as he bumbles through his life, putting on one costume after another, one persona after another, in an effort to discover who he is really is. It's not him but the woman who falls in love with him who discovers that, though. A quiet, entertaining read.
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Title: Earthly Possessions by Anne Tyler ISBN: 0449911810 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: If Morning Ever Comes by Anne Tyler ISBN: 0449911780 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Clock Winder by Anne Tyler ISBN: 0449911799 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Celestial Navigation by Anne Tyler ISBN: 0449911802 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: A Slipping-Down Life by Anne Tyler ISBN: 0804108862 Publisher: Ivy Books Pub. Date: 23 August, 1992 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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