Toni Morrison seems to be returning…. risk and mischief to the contemporary American novel, and never more extravagantly than in "Tar Baby," her fourth and most ambitious book. (pp. 1, 30)

[In] "Tar Baby," Miss Morrison gives us a candy manufacturer named Valerian Street, a white man….

He lives oblivious to a story within his own family—a story too good for me to spoil for the reader…. The family's loyal black cook, Ondine, will reveal the tale; she and her husband, Sydney, the butler, have devoted most of their lives to serving Valerian Street. They are the white man's dream of "good Negroes," which means thay love their master's child as if he were their own, they keep their place, they grow quietly and uncomplainingly old….

They also provide Miss Morrison with an opportunity to exercise her considerable gift for dialogue; this old couple's conversation is sparkling and through it the reader learns the circumstances of Valerian's retirement to the Caribbean. It is both his and his wife's sorrow that their only son won't share this paradise (the mystery of the novel, and it's a gruesome mystery, is why the son, Michael, stays away)….

In "Tar Baby" Toni Morrison lavishes her strongest prose on descriptions of nature….

At times this effort to see the world from nature's point of view seems precious, even cute …, but the richness of the best of these passages (a description of the death of a river, for example) makes Miss Morrison's excesses tolerable.

Less tolerable, however, is her excessive use of dialogue: too much of the story is told through dialogue—and not only through the old couple's conversations. Their niece, Jadine, a super-educated, super-beautiful young woman, a Paris model who "made those white girls disappear. Just disappear right off the page," has a love affair with an escaped criminal, a poor, uneducated north Florida black. This affair is the book's erotic and dramatic center. Jadine and her lover Son (his father was called Old Man) passionately and violently debate the best way for blacks to be independent of the white man's world. Their arguments are lengthy and become tedious, but they vividly expose the novel's racial tensions….

What's so powerful, and subtle, about Miss Morrison's presentation of the tension between blacks and whites is that she conveys it almost entirely through the suspicions and prejudices of her black characters. It is the white world that has created this, and in the constant warring between Sydney, Ondine and Jadine, and between Jadine and Son, Miss Morrison uncovers all the stereotypical racial fears felt by whites and blacks alike. Like any ambitious writer, she's unafraid to employ these stereotypes—she embraces the representative quality of her characters without embarrassment, then proceeds to make them individuals too. (p. 30)

"Tar Baby" is, of course, a black novel, a novel deeply perceptive of the black's desire to create a mythology of his own to replace the stereotypes and myths the white man has constructed for him. It is also a book about a woman's anger at—and her denial of—her need for an impossible man, and in this regard it is a woman's novel too…. Yet Toni Morrison's greatest accomplishment is that she has raised her novel above the social realism that too many black novels and women's novels are trapped in. She has succeeded in writing about race and women symbolically….

Some readers will find the overlapping narrative structure an irritation; this is one of the problems with Miss Morrison's dependence on dialogue to advance and fill in the story. Some readers may resist the movement toward myth in the book's deliberately symbolic ending—and some complaints, some wish to know more concretely what happens, may be justified….

But Toni Morrison is less interested in the final details of her characters lives than she is interested in demonstrating the vast discrepancies between the places black people end up and the places they seek. (p. 31)