Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Walker, Alice (Vol. 27) - Mel Watkins

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MEL WATKINS

Without doubt, Alice Walker's latest novel is her most impressive. No mean accomplishment, since her previous books … have elicited almost unanimous praise for Miss Walker as a lavishly gifted writer. "The Color Purple," while easily satisfying that claim, brings into sharper focus many of the diverse themes that threaded their way through her past work….

Most prominent [of the book's major themes] is the estrangement and violence that mark the relationships between Miss Walker's black men and women….

[Miss Walker has] dealt with [this] subject before. In her collection "You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down," two stories ("Porn" and "Coming Apart") assess the sexual disaffection among black couples. And the saintly heroine of the novel "Meridian" is deserted by a black lover who then marries a white civil-rights worker, whom he also later abandons. In "Meridian," however, the friction between black men and women is merely one of several...

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1. Introduction
2. Katha Pollitt
3. Carol Rumens
4. Peter S. Prescott
5. Mel Watkins
6. Robert Towers
7. Dinitia Smith
8. Klaus Ensslen
9. Elizabeth Bartelme
10. Copyright

1. Alice Walker