The life depicted in Toni Morrison's earlier novels drew its strength from her flawless recollection of a cherished and painful past. Tar Baby is set not on the writer's native ground but on a French island in the Caribbean where she, too, is only a tourist, and the novel seems to have been designed more as a vehicle for bitter judgments than as a reflective rendering of memory. This may account for its disjointed tone, its florid language, and the incongruity of its parts: a lush tropic locale; a gorgeously romantic and doomed love story; a melodramatic family scandal; and the harsh indictment of white civilization that washes over it all.

Tar Baby introduces white characters for the first time—Valerian Street, the wealthy candy manufacturer who paid for Jadine's education, and his wife Margaret, a former Miss Maine with a terrible secret…. [Valerian is] self-mocking, quirky, and generous to a fault—a tyrant with a heart of tarnished gold—and Miss Morrison's portrait of the old man shuttles so erratically between fondness and outrage that he is hard to place in her moral scheme….

The racial and cultural tensions in Tar Baby are played out mainly in the fiery love affair between Jadine and a black fugitive called Son, who opens the can of worms at the heart of Valerian's household, and by implication at the heart of white society as well. In an unrelenting tirade which summons up memories of the black-power assaults on white America in the 60's and which puts no distance between character and author, Son pours out his wrath on the white barbarians….

Son's very name implies that the continuity of the black people, as Miss Morrison sees it, can survive only by resisting every white encroachment on its wholeness.

Though Miss Morrison tries to dramatize the lovers' irreconcilable views, one senses a good deal of ambivalence and evasiveness beneath her uncompromising racial severity, and this may explain the pointless extravagance of her style in Tar Baby, which leans heavily on the pathetic fallacy…. After a while the incessant anthropomorphizing of nature becomes grotesque. (p. 57)

Even the title of Tar Baby contributes to the underlying confusion of Miss Morrison's story, her failure to consider the way a metaphor can mislead. In the Uncle Remus story, a tar baby is the black doll a white farmer puts into the cabbage patch to trap the thieving rabbit. As Son hurls the tale at his lover's head in their final quarrel, Valerian becomes the white man who made tar baby Jadine—but how, then, does Son stand for the rabbit who outsmarts the farmer and runs away? Why does he desperately try to find Jadine after she runs back to Paris? None of this makes much sense, and perhaps Miss Morrison had nothing more allusive in mind than the blackness and stickiness of tar, which will cling to Jadine no matter how completely she imagines herself accepted in the white world. It is a depressing judgment, but Tar Baby does not convince us that it must be true. (pp. 57-8)