[Song of Solomon] and to an even greater extent Morrison's earlier novels The Bluest Eye and Sula,… entirely concern black people who violate, victimize, and kill each other…. No relationships endure, and all are founded on exploitation. The victimization of blacks by whites is implicit but not the subject. The picture given by … Morrison of the plight of the decent, aspiring individual in the black family and community is more painful than the gloomiest impressions encouraged by either stereotype or sociology….

Song of Solomon is a picaresque and allegorical saga of a middle-class northern black family, the Deads, in particular of the son Milkman Dead, but also of parents, sisters, aunts, cousins, and, when Milkman eventually travels south in search of treasure and family history, of numerous distant connections. The resemblance to Roots is perhaps the least satisfying thing about the book; the characters are apt at any moment to burst into arias of familial lore less interesting than their immediate predicaments….

Here, as in Morrison's earlier and perhaps more affecting work, human relationships are symbolized by highly dramatic events. In Sula a mother pours gasoline over her son and lights it, and, in another place, a young woman watches with interest while her mother burns. But the horrors, rather as in Dickens, are nearly deprived of their grisliness by the tone. It might be a folktale in which someone cuts someone else's heart out and buries it under a tree, from which a thorn bush springs, and so on. Morrison is interested in black folklore, but in fact the influences of the Bible, Greek myths, and English and American literature are more evident, as in the work of other American writers.

There is a sense in which the use of myth is evasive. Morrison's effect is that of a folktale in which conventional narrative qualities like unity and suspense are sacrificed to the cumulative effects of individual, highly romantic or mythic episodes, whose individual implausibility, by forcing the reader to abandon the criteria of plausibility, cease to matter. In this way, the writer can imply that hers are not descriptions of reality but only symbols of a psychological condition. Yet if her tales are merely symbolic, the reader can complain of their sensationalism. If they are true, her view of a culture in which its members, for whatever reasons, cannot depend for safety and solace on even the simplest form of social cooperation is almost too harrowing to imagine. (p. 6)