Word: morgans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...UNIVERSAL MORGAN transcends the setting of the story, an achievement all the more remarkable because the author has set her novel specifically, almost immovable, in time and place. The Gowers live in Baltimore of the late '60s and '70s, and each chapter has a date for a title. While the externals of '70s life--Master Charge, the Brady Bunch, straight-leg jeans, and Tab--wander through the book, they do so like ships adrift without any place to anchor. In fact, these details act like red-herring clues to the insoluable detective story of Morgan's psyche. Morgan seems even...
About halfway through the novel, Tyler concedes what we have suspected all along: all of her characters, not only Morgan, act irrationally. Morgan's sister marries her childhood sweetheart, who sleeps with her graduation photo under his arm. His wife publishes his obituary in the newspaper while Morgan is still alive; Emily's husband Leon develops an inexplicable hatred for marionettes. Tyler hammers home Morgan's role as archetype for humanity. As Morgan realizes about his father, human beings simply do not think or act in an orderly or understandable process...
Without a hint of despair or ill health he had taken a room at the Winken Blinken Motor Hotel one starry evening in April and slit both wrists with a razor blade. Morgan has spent a large part of his life trying to find out why. The possibility had begun to settle upon him, as imperceptibly as dust, that perhaps there hadn't been a reason at all. Maybe a man's interest in life could just thin up to a trickle and dry up; was that...
...long as the Gowers remain content to gallivant around Baltimore in their peculiar fashion, they don't harm anyone. Morgan's wife has only to worry about where to get his ostrich feathers laundered. But Morgan's Passing develops an ugly side. Morgan's family realizes that their actions have no basis in reason. They give up trying to influence or even approach one another. The family, and by Tyler's analogy, all human beings, withdraw into hollow conversation, a Chekhovian void where people talk over each other's shoulders and pay less attention to their friends than to their...
...Tyler shies from any condemnation of her characters, even when they act thoughtlessly cruel to one another. She portrays Morgan's family as indifferent to each other's feelings because, in their world, no person has the power to consider anyone else in his actions. This rejection of others goes beyond narcissism. If human beings could act with regard for others' feelings, they would be acting rationally and could therefore be subject to explanation or successful analysis. Egocentricism guarantees the mystery, and therefore, the humanity, of all people...