Song of Solomon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 140003342X ISBN 13: 9781400033423

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004

New York Times Bestseller

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 brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. 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.
"You can't go wrong by reading or re-reading the collected works of Toni Morrison. Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Sula, everything else — they're transcendent, all of them. You’ll be glad you read them."--Barack Obama

Review:

Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 1996: In an effort to hide his Southern, working class roots, Macon Dead, an upper-class Northern black businessman, tries to insulate his family from the danger and despair of the rank and file blacks with whom he shares the neighborhood. The plan leads his son, "Milkman"--a named he earned after his mother nursed him well past the proper age--onto a path exactly opposite the one his father had hoped. Milkman is driven into the arms of a violent, lower-class woman, into a clandestine circle of blacks who repay white violence in kind and into an awareness that he can fulfill his own potential by understanding the mistakes of his ancestors as they relate to his own.

From the Publisher:

"A stunningly beautiful book . . . I would call the book poetry, but that would seem to be denying its considerable power as a story. Whatever name you give it, it's full of magnificent people, each of them complex and multilayered, even the narrowest of them narrow in extravagant ways."
--Anne Tyler
Washington Post Book World

"Morrison's prose is a delight, full of the lyrical variety and allusiveness that distinguish a rich folkloric tradition. Her real gift, though, is for characterization, and Song of Solomon is peopled with an amazing collection of losers and fighters, innocents and murderers, followers of ghosts and followers of money, all of whom add to the pleasure of this exceptionally diverse novel."
--The Atlantic Monthly

"Morrison moves easily in and out of the lives and thoughts of her characters, luxuriating in the diversity of circumstance and personality, and reveling in the sound of their voices and of her own, which echoes and elaborates theirs."
--The New Yorker

"Exuberant . . . An artistic vision that encompasses both a private and a national heritage."
--Time

"A fine novel exuberantly constructed . . . So rich in its use of common speech, so sophisticated in its use of literary traditions and language from the Bible to Faulkner . . . it is also extremely funny."
--The Hudson Review