Morrison, Toni (Vol. 4) | Morrison, Toni 1931–
Morrison, Toni 1931–
Ms Morrison, a Black American, is an editor and novelist. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 29-32.)
Toni Morrison is someone who really knows how to clank a sentence, as the novelist Irving Rosenthal has put it, and her dialogue is so compressed and life-like that it sizzles. And Morrison's skill at characterization is such that, by the end [of Sula], it's as if an enormous but too severely framed landscape has been unrolled and inhabited by people who seem almost mythologically strong and familiar; like the gorgeous characters of García Márquez, they have a heroic quality, and it's hard to believe we haven't known them forever.
Yet the comparison can't be extended: Morrison hasn't endowed her people with life beyond their place and function in the novel, and we can't imagine their surviving outside the tiny community where they carry on their separate lives. It's this particular quality that makes...
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