[2] Morgan Gower is a middle-aged husband and father who works at Cullen's Hardware Store.

Morgan's life is boring: His house is dominated by his wife and daughters who generally ignore him, and his workplace is too slow for his active mind, his wit, and his imagination.

One day, he meets a young couple, Emily and Leon Meredith, performing their puppet show in public.

John Leonard of The New York Times said, "Morgan, like a novelist, wants to be everybody else in order to look at himself through innocent eyes, to be charmed....Miss Tyler, witty, civilized, curious, with her radar ears and her quill pen dipped on one page in acid and on the next in orange liqueur, is asking whether art is adequate to the impersonations life insists on, death absolves.

"[3] In The New York Review of Books, James Wolcott compared Tyler to a "sentry or a detective [who] 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.