If Morning Ever Comes was Anne Tyler's first published book, and all the hallmarks of her later works - the eccentric family, the family member who is disconnected from intimacy, and the small insults of daily life - are all here, although not nearly well put together as they are in her later works.

In this book Ben Joe Hawkes (a really unsatisfying name, by the way) has left his resolutely cheerful family to go to law school at Columbia in New York City. However, he cannot stop thinking (and worrying) about the family he left in North Carolina. So one cold November day, he decides to skip school and to go home. What does he expect to find? There is no big welcome. In fact, they all wonder what he's doing there, and, quite frankly, so does the reader.

Various family crises (his sister has left her husband & returned home with her baby) and events (going with Grandma to see an old man in a nursing home who has returned to die in his home town) occur, but with very little drama. Ben Joe reconnects with his old girlfriend who is seriously dating another man, but seems all to willing to throw him over for Ben Joe - that is until said young man gets a gander at Ben Joe's newly returned & maybe soon to be divorced older sister.

Yes, yes, I know we're supposed to read this & think about the father who left his wife for another woman, the seemingly cold-hearted mother & poor old Ben Joe trying to hold it all together & make sense of it all. But by the end of the novel, I just didn't care about these people.

I'll continue to read Tyler's current efforts, but this book I'm filing in the same drawer as Mozart juvenalia - not really worth the effort. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed this quick read by Anne Tyler. I could totally relate with the main character, Ben Joe, who, when away, felt needed and wanted at home and yet, when there, felt like he was still outside the group. I liked how quickly one got to know the characters and yet at times I was surprised by some of their actions and words. A good read. ( )

A quiet novel, set in the early 60s/50s, difficult to be sure which, but certainly another time. Two family members are making decisions about their future. Well written, of course and interesting. ( )

2358 If Morning Ever Comes, by Anne Tyler (read 13 Feb 1991) This is Tyler's first novel (1964). It is delightful. Such a joy to read about moral people. Ben Joe Hawkes is 25 and a first year student at Columbia Law who decides to go home to Sandhill, N. C., where his mother, his six sisters, and his grandmother live--they are such characters, and Ben Joe is such a character himself. Tyler writes superbly and this book was so easy to read, though it doesn't seem too momentous. ( )

If Morning Ever Comes was Anne Tyler’s first novel. Written in 1964 it still seems fresh upon rereading. Although Ben Joe Hawkes has gone to New York to college, his mind and heart are in Sandhill, N. C. with the family he left behind. Perhaps because he was the only male among the gaggle of sisters (6!), mother and grandmother, he feels a sense of responsibility greater than most freshmen would and abruptly returns when he learns a married sister has come home with her child.
Ben Joe is an unlikely hero but acts of kindness come naturally to him. He befriends an elderly man on the train, he visits the woman who had been his father’s mistress. He is considerate to his Mother and Grandmother, despite his awareness of their faults and idiosyncrasies. The family and a former girlfriend are confused by his presence: he should be at school, and yet he’s with them as if he’d never gone away.
Anne Tyler gives readers vignettes of smalltown life: a doctor with athlete’s foot who goes shoeless (to the consternation of his patients), the harried staff of an old people’s home, the front porch swings on every house.
Ben Joe can’t solve his family’s problems. He does his best and that will have to do for the time being. They’ll be distracted, we know, when he calls from New York to tell them he’s taken his high school sweetheart back with him, and that the next time he visits it will be as a married man. ( )