Review by Booklist Review
The extraordinary, challenging, and enduring work of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is examined in this illuminating and fascinating new collection of essays by award-winning novelist Serpell (The Furrows, 2022). Serpell analyzes Morrison's unforgettable characters, intricate language, indelible imagery, uses of humor, considerations of stereotypes, interpretations of classic genres, and her sophistication and genius. Each chapter is dedicated to a specific work, and the collection is bookended by two insightful essays about the perceived "difficulty" in Morrison the person and her writing and the ways in which she was monumentalized after her death. Serpell writes that even late in Morrison's life, "her notorious difficulty, which could slide unpredictably from the counterintuitive to the controversial to the contrarian, was still in evidence." Serpell brings to these essays her literary and academic expertise as well as her own personal relationship to the work, including the construction of this book, observing, "spending that much time with the lovely, lilting loops of her handwriting, reading all these words from across her life, across nearly a century, . . . conjured a speculative kind of intimacy." Academic yet accessible, this astute collection offers insight and fresh perspectives and will appeal to readers new to and deeply familiar with Morrison's vital body of work.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Serpell (The Furrows), a novelist and professor of English at Harvard, provides an insightful and stimulating exploration of the work of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. Arguing that Morrison's literary skill often gets overshadowed by her public image as a Black female writer, Serpell focuses on the novelist's artistry and technique, demonstrating "how to read Morrison with the seriousness that she deserves." Most chapters interrogate a single novel, beginning with Morrison's first, The Bluest Eye, in which Serpell finds an "emphasis on absence" that pushes the narrative beyond "an identitarian sob story" into a work of art. Throughout, she highlights Morrison's tendency to critique, or "throw shade" at, white stories, arguing, for example, that the 1981 novel Tar Baby is a satirical retelling of the 1967 film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? In exploring Morrison's archives, Serpell finds notes that reveal the title character in Morrison's masterpiece Beloved returns in her subsequent novel Jazz as the character Wild. Serpell also takes readers through Morrison's only published short story, "Recitatif," which chronicles an interracial female friendship without specifying the race of either character, as well as a handful of her critical pieces, plays, and poems. Through exceptional close readings and sharp analyses, Serpell puts Morrison's genius on full display. This will enthrall Morrison fans and cultivate new ones. (Jan.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The Nobel laureate's singular aesthetics. Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison's notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. "There are passages in Morrison's works," she has found, "that no reader I've ever met understands on the first go." The source of Morrison's "famed difficulty," as Serpell sees it, was not "her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics," but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell's subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, "Recitatif"--Morrison's only published short story--and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, "refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result."Tar Baby (1981), Morrison's fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer's career that she "directly addressed the white/black dichotomy" with characters who "are avatars for race." Serpell gives extensive attention to "Recitatif," a story in which "all racial codes" are vanished, yet one in which "racial identity is crucial" to its characters. The story emerges as "a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue" between its two female protagonists, "between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader's experience and the story's unresolved chords--or codes." Celebrating Morrison's "masterful difficulty and superb wit," "her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors," and "her unaccountable rushes of imagination," Serpell affords ample evidence that she was "a writer whose deliberate difficulty--personal, political, and literary--defied classification…and made for brilliance." An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
