The laboring poor of The Bluest Eye, the self-sufficient women and drifting men of Sula, the avaricious middle class and defiantly marginal citizens of Song of Solomon—they are gone, replaced, in Tar Baby, by the rich, their servants, their dependents and the sans culottes who threaten their security. Though much is made of money, fashion, commodities as consciousness, and the experiences open to the privileged, the cultured, and those clever enough to hustle a piece of the action, the people living on Isle des Chevaliers, voluntary exiles all, seem to inhabit a world that is oppressively parochial and provincial….

The people on Isle des Chevaliers have much on their minds…. All are haunted by recurring opaque dreams, by memories of what they have lost, renounced. Inner monologues drift through the heat; themes are pulled out and rummaged through like the many clothes in the several closets. Everyone is poised for a dramatic happening. The table has been set for a troubled Christmas in the sun.

Michael, the prodigal son, does not show up for the holiday feast. But—guess who's coming for dinner—a dirty, hungry black man with "dreadlocks," discovered hiding out in Margaret's closet, is invited by Valerian to eat and drink, much to the consternation of everyone else. His presence confuses further the already tense, tangled relations in the house. (p. 24)

Picking out what happens in Tar Baby is like trying to keep one's balance in a swamp. The writing is so elaborate that it distracts and obscures. Many labored metaphors and phrases that are not quite true images occur….

Imposing human qualities on inanimate objects does not make Isle des Chevaliers more interesting or more deeply felt. The narrative often conveys the thoughts of the characters in the same manner, which only serves to make their feelings indecipherable.

The attempt to evoke unknown places poetically and to suffuse the work with a feeling of myth and magic suggests the high, assertive styles of such writers as Carpentier, Asturias, or Marquez. But the language of Tar Baby is, at best, strained, and the convoluted verbal conjurings make for a tone that is overreaching, taxing to the ear….

It is hard to know what Morrison means by [her allusions to the tar baby myth], difficult to decide what her characters represent. In anthropological studies such as those of Melville Herskovits one finds that a tar baby is a monster who stalks the woods near plantations, preying on children. Tar Baby is also the subject of a well-known folk tale about a trickster thief who gets trapped in his own snare. Both are applicable to this novel—perhaps. Folklore, of a kind, has always percolated through Morrison's work.

Many of Morrison's previous concerns are here—having to do with the inner life of black women and especially the offhand, domestic violence and conjugal brutality that burn out daily life. Much of the recent fiction by Afro-American women contains these themes. Their message is new and arresting, as if, in the past, the worries of the kitchen or the bedroom were not sufficiently large to encompass the intense lives of black people in a racist society. But Tar Baby's sense of such experience is inchoate, muffled. One wishes for the fierce concentration, the radical economy of the novels of Gayl Jones as they describe the inner world of black women in language that is harsh, disturbing, and utterly unsentimental. (p. 25)