These origins, which Milkman’s father is intent on concealing, fuel him in a merciless drive toward money and safety - over and past the happiness of wife and daughters and son. He is the son of an upper middle-class Northern black mother and a father with obscure working-class Southern origins. His name is Macon Dead, called “Milkman” because his mother nursed him well past infancy. But after the loving, comical and demanding polyphony of the early chapters (set in Michigan in the early 1930s), the theme begins to settle on one character and to develop around and out of him. The strategies are multiple and depend upon the actions of a large cast of black Americans, most of them related by blood.
The purpose seems to be communication of painfully discovered and powerfully held convictions about the possibility of transcendence within human life, on the time-scale of a single life. In fact, its negotiations with fantasy, fable, song and allegory are so organic, continuous and unpredictable as to make any summary of its plot sound absurd but absurdity is neither Morrison’s strategy nor purpose. “Song of Solomon” isn’t, however, cast in the basically realistic mode of most family novels. In short, this is a full novel - rich, slow enough to impress itself upon us like a love affair or a sickness - not the two-hour penny dreadful which is again in vogue nor one of the airless cat’s cradles custom-woven for the delight and job-assistance of graduate students of all ages. The result is a long prose tale that surveys nearly a century of American history as it impinges upon a single family.
Yet, firm as they both were in achievement and promise, they didn’t fully forecast her new book, “Song of Solomon.” Here the depths of the younger work are still evident, but now they thrust outward, into wider fields, for longer intervals, encompassing many more lives. Toni Morrison’s first two books - “The Bluest Eye” with the purity of its terrors and “Sula” with its dense poetry and the depth of its probing into a small circle of lives - were strong novels. SONG OF SOLOMON by Toni Morrison | Review first published Sept.
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