In the past, white folks have figured in Toni Morrison's novels more or less the way adults are portrayed in the TV version of Peanuts—as vague, muffled, offstage voices, menacing or comforting but essentially irrelevant. Tar Baby does posses a pair of white characters, but this book is not much more about them than the others have been….

Symbols multiply and recur, so that the story too often seems merely to exist for the sake of its meaning. At the center are a dozen variations on maternity, natural and unnatural. The questions toward which we are led, inexorably, are "Mamaspoiled black man, will you mature with me? Culture-bearing black woman, whose culture are you bearing?"

The inventive drive that carries us forward is as great as it has been in Morrison's three previous novels. Even more brilliant are the candor and complexity with which Morrison sets forth the dilemmas of co-opted blackness. There is not a shade missing on her spectrum, from the untainted and aboriginal … through small-town, old-time piety, big-city manners, to the sophisticated corruption of Jadine, who wears good boots and take's pictures of the down-home children that make them look as stupid as she thinks they are.

A new myth is being forged, and, like all myths, it is meant to be both an explanation and an exhoriation. But the myth-maker in this case, having set down so indelibly deep pain and confusion, in her anger and hope adopts the tone of the scold more often than that of the prophet. The judgments on these characters have been made; in fact, the characters themselves turn out, disappointingly, only to serve single ulterior purposes.

A simplifying grid has been laid across their vital independent lives, and it ends by covering over too many fine lines and intricate shadings.

Toni Morrison has made herself into the D. H. Lawrence of the black psyche, transforming individuals into forces, idiosyncrasy into inevitability. Along the way, Tar Baby has yielded up, for the sake of its grand scheme, some of the irreducible mystery, the fluidity of Morrison's best work.