![]() ![]() ![]() It is in fact a remarkable thing: proof that Toni Morrison is at once America's most deliberate and flexible writer. "Home," then, is not what it might appear: a short book by a writer who, at this point, could publish her collected recipes and earn accolades. With the exception of "Paradise," though, Morrison's baroque storytelling structures have always worked best in the longer novels: "Song of Solomon," "Beloved," and "Jazz." The music of Morrison's language, with its poetic oral qualities, its ability to be both past and present in one long line, requires a robust structure, a big space a small auditorium simply does not suit it. You can open them to any page and fall in, the way a radio dial cycling past a Miles Davis song must, and does, stop. Her books are rich with talk, with riffs, with sass, and with the sounds, especially, of African-American speech. And yet there is no novelist alive who has captured the beauty and democracy of the American vernacular so well. ![]()
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