Because Toni Morrison is black, female, and the author of Song of Solomon …, one expects from her a fiction of ideas as well as characters.

Tar Baby has both. And its so sophisticated a novel that Tar Baby might well be tarred and feathered as bigoted, racist, and a product of male chauvinism were it the work of a white male—say, John Updike, whom Morrison brings to mind.

One of fiction's pleasures is to have your mind scratched and your intellectual habits challenged. While Tar Baby has shortcomings, lack of provocation isn't one of them. Morrison owns a powerful intelligence. It's run by courage. She calls to account conventional wisdom and accepted attitude at nearly every turn of her story. She wonders about the sacrifice of love, the effects of racial integration, the intention of chartity. Continually she questions both the logic and morality of seeking happiness or what Freud said passes for it, freedom from pain, by living in social accommodation. Although Morrison tells a love story—indeed, she tells two or three stories about love—her narrative lines run to complexities far beyond those of physical or emotional bonding….

Tar Baby opens as a black American merchant sailor jumps his Swedish ship and swims toward Isle des Chevaliers, a Haitian island owned by a handful of U.S. millionaires…. He tells Valerian Street, the 75-year-old imperious Philadelphia candy king, whose retirement retreat he invades, that his name is William Green. But he calls himself Son.

Son fascinates Morrison. He personifies freedom. She says he comes from that "great underclass of undocumented men … day laborers and musclemen, gamblers, sidewalk merchants, migrants … part-time mercenaries, full-time gigolos, or curbside musicians," all distinguished by "their refusal to equate work with life and an inability to stay anywhere for long."…

Part of Morrison's attraction to Son is literary fantasy. She sees him as kin to Huck Finn or Nigger Jim, Caliban or John Henry, and other mythic wayfarers. But mostly, I think, Morrison sees Son as the official heroic black male. Son doesn't jive or wear gold chains. He is proud of his farmer father. He jumps ship because he is homesick for Eloe, Florida. His yearnings are toward his sources, not a future of assimilation.

Son also thinks black woman, not white, and finds her at Valerian Street's estate. He gets her—for a while, anyway—after turning the established order upside down. (p. 1)

While it's not clear why the family fight drives Jadine into Son's arms, Morrison wills it. Perhaps it's because Jadine sees "savannas in his eyes." The pair flee to New York. Jadine tries to remake Son into an upwardly mobile black male. He takes her to his beginnings in Eloe, where rooms have no windows, unmarried couples don't sleep in the same bed, and Son takes orders from his father, "Old Man." The bond breaks. Jadine heads for Paris by way of Isle des Chevaliers. Son comes back too late, bounding through the beach trees like a god, "Lickety-lickety-lickety split."

There is so much that is good, sometimes dazzling, about Tar Baby—poetic language (despite pathetic fallacies), arresting images, fierce intelligence—that after climbing past the stereotyped marriage of Valerian and Margaret Street, one becomes entranced by Toni Morrison's story. The settings are so vivid the characters must be alive. The emotions they feel are so intense they must be real people.

The ideas Morrison suggests—that blacks seek ways to hate whites, that black people cannot be fully human on white values, that integration is another way of control, that physical prowess is embedded in black masculinity are arguable enough to keep you awake at night.

But something is missing in Tar Baby. It's a credible set of motives. Would a penniless, homesick Son jump ship in the Caribbean to get back to Florida and then head first to New York? Would Jadine drop 25 years of rearing, education, and conscience for a semi-literate she knew two weeks and slept with, perhaps, twice? Would a manipulator and observer as shrewd as Valerian Street miss the signs that his only child was verging on psychosis, and do nothing? Margaret's explanation for torturing her child is no explanation; she had a maid to soften the impact of child-rearing. Logic takes flight in Tar Baby.

To believe Toni Morrison's characters isn't to believe their dramatic behavior. They are real people—in a story. The reason we can't credit their behavior is because, except for the most minor of figures, their actions are determined by Morrison's convictions, not their histories. Such is the curse of novels of ideas. (pp. 1-2)