Volume 27, Number 5 · April 3, 1980
Some Fun!
By James Wolcott
Morgan's Passing
by Anne Tyler
Knopf, 311 pp., $9.95
Life Before Man
by Margaret Atwood
Simon and Schuster, 317 pp., $11.95
Like a sentry or a detective, Anne Tyler seems to notice everything: the pale fluorescent gloom of laundromats, pockets filled with lint-covered jellybeans, the smell of crabcakes and coconut oil on a Delaware beach, grapy veins in the calves of middle-aged mothers. As a chronicler of domestic fuss, Tyler can be compared to John Updike. When Updike writes about an ice-cream parlor tabletop in The Coup or a fast-food restaurant in Rabbit Redux, the suburbs can take on a Nabokovian shimmer of new-found delight. In Tyler's work, however, everything is scuffed-up and comfortably lived-in; 'Wash Me' is written into the dust. Her characters are fraying at the edges, strays and daydreamers sunk in their own reveries. Circumstances prick them awake, and like the dolls Tyler describes at the end of Earthly Possessions they share a look of bewildered surprise, 'as if wondering how they got here.'
Review, 1776 words
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