Captain's Log: Song of Solomon
"Jesus! Here he was walking around in the middle of the twentieth century trying to explain what a ghost had done."
Amid all the chest thumping about how novelists used to fearlessly write about the lives of people different than themselves – different genders, different races, different classes, different life experiences – the long tail of literary history does show an awful lot of writers writing about what they know – people a lot like themselves. Alice Munro has her Canadian anglophile women (to the point that it feels shocking to read a story of her’s from a man’s perspective), John Updike his outrageously horny men, Dostoevsky his mad Russians, and Toni Morrison her Black women of the American midwest. Those are reductive characterizations, sure, and there are exceptions big and small to all of them, but authors generally find their milieu and stick with it over the course of their novels.
It’s particularly exciting, then, to see an author step out of their comfort zone, as Morrison does in Song of Solomon. Her previous novels – The Bluest Eye and Sula – are so concerned with modes of femininity and the lives of girls and women – while Song of Solomon features, as Morrison writes in her foreward, “a radical shift in imagination from a female locus to a male one. To get out of the house, to de-domesticate the landscape that had so far been the site of my work …" This book would instead be “an overtly, stereotypically male narrative … Old school heroic, but with other meanings.”
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