[Song of Solomon] moves slowly, but with gathering momentum, into the heart of that myth-making impulse, pressing ever deeper on the human pain that is its motive force….

As readers of her previous novels, The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1974), know, Toni Morrison is an extraordinarily good writer. Two pages into anything she writes, one feels the power of her language and the emotional authority behind that language. The world she creates is thick with an atmosphere through which her characters move slowly, in pain, ignorance, and hunger. And to a very large degree Morrison has the compelling ability to make one believe that all of us (Morrison, the characters, the reader) are penetrating that dark and hurtful terrain—the feel of a human life—simultaneously.

Unfortunately, in Song of Solomon, Morrison's ability is not exercised to the largest degree. At a certain point one begins to feel a manipulativeness in the book's structure, and then to sense that the characters are moving to fulfill the requirements of that structure. Once this happens, the plausibility of Milkman's search into the mythic, magical heart of the fear of leaving childhood—the book's central metaphor—begins to disintegrate. Revelations seem to be set up like pieces on a chessboard, and the "magic" loses its ability to command suspended disbelief.

With any other writer, this could be fatal. But it is not with Toni Morrison. There are so many individual moments of power and beauty in Song of Solomon that, ultimately, one closes the book warmed through by the richness of its sympathy, and by its breathtaking feel for the nature of sexual sorrow.

It seems to me that the source of the artistic trouble in Song of Solomon lies with Morrisons's choice of Milkman as protagonist—instead of with one of the women in the book. Milkman never really comes to life…. There are a few pages describing the blossoming love affair between [Milkman's sister] First Corinthians and a traumatized handyman that are filled with such astonishing pain and beauty that a book dominated by such descriptions would have been a masterpiece. These pages turn on Morrison's sure, hard knowledge of the inside of that woman's life: the grotesque anguish beneath the surface of a stifled existence….

Song of Solomon does not, in my view, achieve wholeness because it suffers from a misdirected angle of vision. But it is the work of a real writer and, as such, cannot fail to yield up moments of rich life, no matter what the direction of its vision.