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…. 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."…

Like Earthly Possessions, Morgan's Passing is a misfit romance. In Earthly Possessions, the misfits—a bank robber, his hostage, and the robber's seventeen-year-old knocked-up sweetheart—drove past Tastee Freeze after Tastee...