Song of Solomon

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this novel, Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.

SYNOPSIS

Toni Morrison (b.1931) is perhaps the most celebrated contemporary American novelist. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, Morrison powerfully evokes in her fiction the legacies of displacement and slavery that have been bequeathed to the African-American community. Morrison was born in Ohio, educated at Howard University and Cornell University, and is now a member of the faculty of Princeton University. Her most widely read novel is perhaps Beloved (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize and was recently adapted for film. Song of Solomon (1977), however, is perhaps the most lyrical of her novels, following Milkman Dead as he struggles to understand his family history and the ways in which that history has both been damaged by and transcended the horror of slavery. All of Morrison's fiction, from her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), to last year's Paradise (1998), explores both the need for and the impossibility of real community and the bonds that both unite and divide African-American women. Morrison has also published a volume of critical work entitled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

FROM THE CRITICS

Reynolds Price

The [novel's] purpose seems to be communication of painfully discovered and powerfully held convictions about the possibility of transcendence within human life . . . .The end is unresolved. Does Milkman survive[?] . . . .Few Americans . . .can say more than she has in this wise and spacious novel. —The New York TimesSeptember 111977

Margo Jefferson - Ms. Magazine

The ordinary spars with the extraordinary in Morrison's books. What would be a classically tragic sensibility, with its implacable move toward crisis and the extremes of pity and horror, is altered and illuminated by a thousand smaller, natural occurrences and circumstances.

Sacred Fire

Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison's lyrical third novel, begins with an arresting scene -- a man on a roof threatening to jump, a woman standing on the ground, singing, and another woman entering labor. The child born of that labor is Macon "Milkman" Dead III; Song of Solomon is the epic story of his life-time journey toward an understanding of his own identity and ancestry. Milkman is born burdened with the materialistic values of his father and the weight of a racist society; over the course of his odyssey he reconnects to his deeper family values and history, rids himself of the burden of his father's expectations and society's limitations, and literally learns to fly.

When the novel opens, Milkman is clearly a man with little or no concern for others. Like his father, he is driven only by his immediate sensual needs; he is spoiled and self-centered and pursues money and sexual gratification at all costs. The novel centers around his search for a lost bag of gold that was allegedly taken from a man involved in his grandfather's murder and then abandoned by his Aunt Pilate. The search for gold takes Milkman and his friend Guitar, a young black militant, to Shalimar, a town named for his great-grandfather Solomon, who according to local legend escaped slavery by taking flight back to Africa on the wind. On his journey, under the influence of his Aunt Pilate, a strong, fearless, natural woman whose values are the opposite of Milkman's father's, Milkman begins to come to terms with his family history, his role as a man, and the possibilities of his life apart from a cycle of physical lust and satisfaction.

In telling the story of Milkman's quest to discover the hidden history of the Deads, Morrison expertly weaves together elements of myth, magic, and folklore. She grapples with fundamental issues of class and race, ancestry and identity, while never losing sight of Milkman's compelling story. The language in Song of Solomon, Morrison's only novel with a male protagonist, is earthy and poetic, the characters eccentric, and the detail vivid and convincing. The result is a novel that is at once emotionally intense, provocative, and inspiring in its description of how one man rediscovered the latent power within him.

Song of Solomon is considered to be Toni Morrison's masterpiece and is in the top echelon of literary works produced by any American writer. It is also her breakthrough novel in both critical and commercial success: It was the first African American novel since Native Son to be a main selection of the Book of the Month club and it won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award among others. The book received a second life, and best-seller status, twenty years after its initial publication when talk show host Oprah Winfrey announced it as a selection for her on-air book club.

Reynolds Price

"Toni Morrison s fisrt 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. Yet, firm as they both were in achievement and promise, they didn't fully forecast her new book, Song Of Solomon.... ...Toni Morrison has earned attention and praise. Few Americans know, and can say, more than she has in this wise and spacious novel."- Books of the Century, The New York Times, September, 1977

Anne Tyler - Anne Tyler, Washington Post Book World