Volume 24, Number 18 · November 10, 1977
The Oppressor in the Next Room
By Diane Johnson
Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
Knopf, 337 pp., $8.95
White Rat
by Gayl Jones
Random House, 178 pp., $7.95
Elbow Room
by James Alan McPherson
Atlantic/Little, Brown, 241 pp., $8.95
Wallace Stevens's words might be the epigraph for the work of both Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison, writers very different from each other, whose wonderful richness and vitality of language in a curious way obscure the moral and physical horror of the similar worlds they create or, perhaps, describe. Milkman Dead, the hero of Morrison's new novel Song of Solomon, has a girlfriend who is trying to kill him. He tells a friend, whose only response is to say:
Review, 2688 words
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