In her first novel, "If Morning Ever Comes," 22-year-old Anne Tyler has written a subtle and surprisingly mature story about the lack of communication between human beings, of a man's essential isolation from the world—and especially and more poignantly from his own family.
Ben Joe Hawkes returns to his North Carolina hometown from New York—where, as a law student at Columbia University, he has been suffering the chills of the city's loneliness. Not that the emotional climate in Carolina is much warmer. Though he enjoys feeling responsible for his family, a widowed mother, a grandmother, six sisters (one of whom, the bright and flirtatious Joanne, has left her husband and returned home), they are astonishingly self-contained. From Susannah, who works in the library, to 10-year-old Tessie, the Hawkes women are as cool and crisp as starched petticoats and as able to stand by themselves. One can assume they inherit their restraint from their mother, whose own chilling ways led her husband to set up another household on the wrong side of town….
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