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Book Reviewed by:An illuminating, electrifying exploration of the work of Toni Morrison by an award-winning novelist and Harvard professor.
Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, "she is our only truly canonical black female writer—and her work is highly complex." In On Morrison, Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and a professor who teaches a course on Morrison to illuminate her masterful experiments with literary form.
This is Morrison as you've never encountered her before, a journey through her oeuvre—her fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry—with contextual guidance, archival discoveries, and original close readings. At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of all time but also on how to read great works of literature in general. This dialogue on the page between two black women artist-readers is stylish, edifying, and thrilling in its scope and intelligence.
If a classical novel is like a brain, then Serpell is that novel's neurologist, separating the dura mater from the skull, exposing the insides with precise maneuvering. While she doesn't refer to Morrison as Queen Toni, it's clear that Serpell admires and adores Morrison's work, and in her academic way she halfway swoons over the subject of her analysis, which I'm fine with, because Serpell carefully plots out the why of Morrison's brilliance. Her scholarship has an elegance in the style of an academic trying to soften the taste of intellectualism so regular people can read their books. Serpell teaches at Harvard, and you are warned from the opening line: "There are many ways to be difficult in this world." To be sure, there are rich passages of deep literary thought designed to expose us to the full width of Morrison's intentions...continued
Full Review
(1377 words)
(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).
Hanif Abdurraqib, New York Times bestselling author of There's Always This Year
Immense gratitude for this book, and for Namwali Serpell's close looking, which has led to these stunning reconsiderations of Morrison, which are incisive, tender, and also honest and unsparing...This is a book that rises to the challenge of extending and expanding a legacy by giving the person at the heart of that legacy time, rigor, and care. Imani Perry, author of South to America, winner of the National Book Award
In On Morrison, Serpell applies her prodigious intellect, vast literary archive, and her own calling as a novelist to magnificent effect in this breathtaking, provocative, and refreshing engagement with Morrison as a thinker as well as an artist. Filled with unique analyses, deep dives, and an intellectual playfulness that Morrison herself so valued, this book will stand as one of the most important twenty-first-century works on the great American writer.
When I was in middle school my father sold a film to Columbia Pictures about his black Chicago childhood. He soon discovered the script had been changed. Chicago was replaced by a small Texas town. The black teenagers were now white. There was an unspoken understanding that what was missing from my father's script was a necessary feature for marketing: the white gaze.
The white gaze, a term popularized by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, refers to the intentional centering of the white experience, regardless of story. Some writers deliberately set a white character count for themselves to get projects greenlighted. Not Morrison. As noted in the literary criticism book On Morrison by Harvard professor Namwali Serpell, Morrison ...
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The low brow and the high brow
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