"Morgan's Passing" is a narrative replete with colorful and idiosyncratic detail, precise in its tenderness. And yet, for all its intentness of specification, the book—like its subject, Morgan Gower—eludes and continues to elude one. The reader stalks Morgan as Morgan stalks Emily and, always, Morgan is just barely out of reach, turning the corner or dipping into some doorway or flattening against a wall, as fugitive and remittent as the refrain from a song one can't forget yet can't quite remember….

[The] novel demands something deeper—not explanation, exactly, but penetration, a sense of intimate particularity. Morgan is so intriguing that he cries out for capture, an act of imaginative possession. What we have are suggestions—scattered moments and the blur of passage. Morgan remains a problem, and Anne Tyler's relation to Morgan is perhaps part of the problem. She seems at once too casually fond...