The Rich Are Different

By Paul Gray

MORGAN'S PASSING by Anne Tyler; Knopf; 320 pages; $9.95

Flamboyant, full-blown eccentrics (Ahab, Henderson, Major Major Major) have become rare in U.S. fiction. Contemporary novelists are seldom content simply to portray people; characters must also be accounted for, their anguishes sorted into symptoms, their mannerisms traced back to unhappy childhoods, bad genes or misfiring chemicals. This process emphasizes clarity at the expense of wonder; nothing can kill magic faster than an explanation. In Morgan's Passing, Novelist Anne Tyler bucks the current trend by offering a hero who is greater than the sum of his neuroses. Morgan Gower exhibits an amiable screwiness that surpasses understanding. He may also be noisy enough to win Tyler, author of seven other highly praised novels, the wide audience her talents deserve.

Nothing seems wrong with Morgan's life except Morgan's place in it. Married to an agreeable and well-to-do woman, he has helped raise seven daughters and coasted through an easy job managing a hardware store owned by his wife's family. Despite prosperity and leisure, he keeps "wondering how this could have happened. As near as he could recall, he had planned on something different." Attempting to find out what, he stalks through his native Baltimore, black beard bristling, dressed in outrageous combinations of funny hats and surplus-store clothing. Each morning in front of his overstuffed closet, Morgan faces a decision: "Who to be today." His wife Bonny has grown so used to his behavior that she can barely be roused to comment on it. "Do you suppose we couldn't all act like that?" she says at one point. "Go swooping around in a velvet cape with a red satin lining and a feathered hat? That part's the easy part. Imagine being his wife, finding a cleaner who does ostrich plumes."

While pretending to be a doctor, Morgan finds himself delivering a baby girl in the back seat of a car. "Doctoring," he reflects later, "was so easy--a matter of mere common sense. It was almost too easy. He'd have more trouble sustaining the role of electrician." The new young parents whom Morgan helps are Emily and Leon Meredith; they make a meager living performing puppet shows at birthday parties. Morgan instantly decides that they are elfin itinerants who have mastered the simple life. Eventually the Merediths accept him as an inevitable, if unusual, member of the family. As years pass and the Meredith marriage sours, Emily and Morgan are drawn together. She becomes pregnant.

This presents a problem to the characters, of course, but to reach this point Tyler has had to solve a puzzler of her own. As a hero, Morgan has all the motile power of a balloon in a drafty room. So what if he leaves Bonny for Emily or vice versa? He can change with the next breeze. Tyler prevents this reaction by tethering Morgan to a household bulging with possessions and people, including his increasingly senile mother and a sister who has made a career out of being unhappy in love. "The extras!" Morgan fumes. "The stacks of unnecessary extras!" Despite his belief that freedom is possible, Morgan can scarcely make a move that will not cause migrations of in-laws and hangers-on, avalanches of furniture.

Given such impedimenta, Morgan's quixotic search for his free spirit is the stuff of comedy, and Tyler plays much of his story just that way. Luckily, her hero is as amusing as he is misguided. He tells an opera story to a bedridden daughter: "Don Giovanni encounters a statue and invites it home to supper." He complains to Emily about Bonny's handling of the family money: "We never see it never buy anything inspiring with it, but it's there, all right, for things that don't show--new slate roof tiles and the children's education." Morgan's determined innocence can lead him to odd perceptions: "Tottery old ladies, people you wouldn't trust to navigate a grocery cart, are heading two-ton cars in your direction at speeds of 70 miles per hour. Our lives depend on total strangers."

Though she allows her tale to veer toward farce, Tyler always checks it in time with the tug of an emotion, a twitch of regret. Morgan's responses are outrageous, but his stimuli are natural. He reminds Bonny of how he used to fear that their baby girls would die: " 'Relax,' you'd say. Remember? But now look: it's as if they died after all. Those funny little roly-poly toddlers, Amy in her Oshkosh overalls--they're dead, aren't they?" His bitter conclusion: "They've dumped their hamsters on us and gone away." Morgan's dislike of change hardly jibes with his own shifting behavior, but it suggests that he may be as brave as he is silly. Morgan's Passing is not another novel about a mid-life crisis; it is a buoyant story about a struggle unto death.

Excerpt

You could say he was a man who had gone to pieces, or maybe he'd always been in pieces; maybe he'd arrived unassembled. Various parts of him seemed poorly joined together. His lean, hairy limbs were connected by exaggerated knobs of bone; his black-bearded jaw was as clumsily hinged as a nutcracker. Parts of his life, too, lay separate from other parts. His wife knew almost none of his friends. His children had never seen where he worked; it wasn't in a safe part of town, their mother said. Last month's hobby--the restringing of a damaged pawnshop banjo, with an eye to becoming suddenly musical at the age of 42--bore no resemblance to this month's hobby, which was the writing of a science fiction novel that would make him rich and famous. He was writing about the death of earth.

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