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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/16\/books\/review\/on-morrison-namwali-serpell.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20260216&instance_id=171166&nl=the-morning&regi_id=122976029&segment_id=215349&user_id=b25c5730c89e0c73f75709d8f1254337",
    "parsed_content": "What to ReadFind Your Next BookFantasyScience FictionThrillersRomanceThe critical enterprise of \u201cOn Morrison\u201d corresponds with a quickening moral imperative to keep Morrison on our lips, to keep her lofty, stratospheric. Credit...Chester Higgins Jr.Skip to contentSkip to site indexSearch & Section NavigationSection NavigationAccountAccountNonfictionToni Morrison, Literary Saint? This Book Shows You What Really Makes Her Great.A new study by the novelist and scholar Namwali Serpell subjects the Nobel laureate\u2019s work to rigorous inspection \u2014 with thrilling results.The critical enterprise of \u201cOn Morrison\u201d corresponds with a quickening moral imperative to keep Morrison on our lips, to keep her lofty, stratospheric. Credit...Chester Higgins Jr.Supported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTShare full articleBy Wesley MorrisFeb. 16, 2026Buy Book \u25beAmazonApple BooksBarnes & NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshop.orgWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.ON MORRISON, by Namwali SerpellThe stratosphere is a kind of in-between space for an artist. Maybe you\u2019ve achieved the celestial, but then all you\u2019ve got is everybody gazing up at you, existing under you, loving the idea of you, the light of you, the gas of you, your myth. The question becomes: Who\u2019s touching you? Often not much criticism, not rigorous criticism. I get it. The stratosphere is all the way up there. Upon arrival, who would know they were even there? It\u2019s perilous. The air \u2014 wait, what air?Toni Morrison is stratospheric. The legend of her seems to speak for itself. The novels, the Nobel, the lectures, the former students, the decades of university syllabuses (although still not enough), the famous inner and still-more-inner circle, the known unknown of her, the unknown known, the many of her raised eyebrows, literarily sucked teeth and that radiological intellectual gaze: Who\u2019s touching any of that?Well, who\u2019s deploying criticism to touch it? Some of us have been waiting for an astronaut to suit up and head out there, for not even a debunking, let alone a dethroning, but just a great, big reminder that this woman is no less ensorcelling when experienced right here on Earth under the guidance of a writer with a magnifying glass, a scalpel and maybe an ashtray.Evidently, Namwali Serpell, the novelist and, in the pages of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, an absorbingly surgical critic, has been one of us waiting people. The difference is that she\u2019s done what we haven\u2019t: hopped on a rocket and touched the Tonisphere, with her mind. This is an aptly Toni Morrison thing to do, write the book you\u2019ve been dying to read. What Serpell\u2019s written, devised, built is \u201cOn Morrison,\u201d a novel-by-novel treatise on, inspection of, spelunking into, playing with Morrisonian philosophy, aesthetics, craft; and she might be having the time of her life.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTOn Morrison Save to your reading list:Want to readHave readMorrison, I think, does this to people who care enough to burrow into the text: exhilarate their intellect. Everybody finds something different \u2014 the critic and scholar Daphne Brooks, for instance, offers ways of experiencing the musicality, particularly the blues, that imbues the novels, that the novels exude. Each chapter in \u201cOn Morrison\u201d feeds the novels through a single grand idea or two: comedy in \u201cSong of Solomon,\u201d the function of names in \u201cSula\u201d and numbers in \u201cParadise.\u201d A happy familiarity or deep fluency with these books leaves you open to the anticipation of somebody else\u2019s facility with them. I liken it to reading a superbly revealing profile of some person of note whom you know better because an astute writer located the truth of them. This book, in that sense, is a revelation.ImageImageSerpell teaches literature herself and \u201cOn Morrison\u201d opens with what feels like a salvo for one of her courses. \u201cPart of my project in this book,\u201d she writes, \u201cis to show you how to read Morrison with the seriousness that she deserves.\u201d The way Serpell aims to frame that seriousness is through the \u201cknot \u2014 or bind \u2014 of gender and race,\u201d a knot that also binds Serpell to Morrison. And yet never so tightly that she feels strapped to her. She indulges a more earnest flavor of her subject\u2019s swag: \u201cOver the years, through my work and experience as a literature professor and fiction writer\u201d \u2014 of the novels \u201cThe Old Drift\u201d and \u201cThe Furrows\u201d \u2014 \u201cI\u2019ve learned a lot about the Black cultural traditions that ground her aesthetics. And I am, as she often said of herself, a very good reader.\u201dI got to the end of that sentence and thought: OK then, let\u2019s go! Serpell can boast like that, saying she\u2019s more than up to the task, because she\u2019s more than up to the task. One word that\u2019s likely to appear in even a dismissal of this book (and I don\u2019t see anyone seriously dismissing it) is some version of \u201crigor.\u201d Serpell has done the work, and you can feel her working still, on almost every page. Her mind is alive. Yes, this is a rigor born from, or at least assisted by, what Serpell calls the archive \u2014 that cosmic storage locker that also tends to be physically housed within a library (Morrison\u2019s lives at Princeton). It\u2019s the rigor of a mind, plumbing. There are moments in the assessments of each book, up through \u201cParadise\u201d \u2014 novel No. 7 \u2014 and on almost every page of the chapter devoted to \u201cJazz,\u201d where I could hear a sizzle. She\u2019s putting these books on the grill.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe rigor is summoned in a search for what makes Morrison such a titanic figure, but Serpell knows that one strategy for achieving this is first at the sentence level and then as a case for structure. Words are unpacked. Literary terms, genres and philosophical ideas are launched: contreblazon, paralepsis, chiaroscuro, polyptoton, antiphrasis, ipseity, antanaclasis, free indirect style, zeugma, ekphrasis, recitatif, antiphony, mondegreen, chronotopes, anagnorisis, intertextuality and metafiction, chiasmus, rhizome, eye dialect, the mathematical and dynamical sublimes. Syncretism is everywhere; there is an entire section on structuralism as conceived by Ferdinand de Saussure. When you lay it out like that, all of those ideas, I have the same thought I do when I look at the instruments on my dental hygienist\u2019s tray: Ain\u2019t no way she used all those on me. She did. Serpell does.ImageHer chapter on \u201cSong of Solomon\u201d and a long passage on \u201cPlaying in the Dark,\u201d from 1992, Morrison\u2019s binocular peering into Blackness\u2019s function in the U.S. literary canon, spend time rooting through the guts of old Black comic and performative and critical forms, like signifying, playing the dozens, reading and shade. Serpell performs mini-disquisitions on anthropological syncretism, which, in her analyses, struck me anew as the novelist\u2019s equivalent of a sampler\u2019s record crate. She uses the occasion of \u201cThe Bluest Eye,\u201d a book imagining the psychological blast radius of incest and rape, to wonder about an assortment of cultural maladies \u2014 censorship, identity politics run amok. Why, she wants to know, would prominent thinkers and authors gather to read this novel aloud in public? Why would you teach it in junior high?This is to say that Serpell\u2019s excitement, her sense of discovery and dismay, become yours. Her ingenious connections \u2014 of Morrison to Nabokov, to Ellison, to Disney, to the ancient Greeks \u2014 inspire you to do your own connecting. Her \u201cBeloved\u201d chapter includes a passage on the multiple judgments among the characters of Sethe\u2019s murder \u2014 some would say her sparing \u2014 of her infant daughter and surmises that \u201cthe reader is left without a clear position\u201d on whose judgment is right. Then she imposes the concept of \u201cvalue incommensurability\u201d and the thinking of the critic William Empson, the author of \u201cSeven Types of Ambiguity,\u201d and suddenly all I could think about was O.J. and the trial and the polarized reactions to both.You learn to trust that the book\u2019s chowdery bits will, somehow, bear fruit. Take her chapter on Morrison\u2019s short story \u201cRecitatif,\u201d about two friends, a Black woman and a white woman, whose respective races Morrison withholds. Serpell takes us through a heavy lecture on poststructuralist concepts like language deriving meaning from negative comparison, meaning that meaning springs more from what something isn\u2019t like than from what it is like. Ah, the stultifying stuff of intermediate lit theory. But then she applies her lesson to the text, and I heard a click. My hand actually shot up, like I was 15. A connection! One based on something as simple but loaded as an em-dash that in Morrison\u2019s story separates \u201cblack\u201d from \u201cwhite,\u201d holding one separate from the other. Conjoining one to the other, handcuffing it. A separator that prevents or forbids one word from becoming the other. In the case of the short story, one doesn\u2019t make sense without the other, loses its meaning. The race is then something new: \u201cblack \u2014 white.\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTI couldn\u2019t have had a thought like that without the inspiration of Serpell\u2019s rigor to notice it. Who knows what kind of grade that would get me in her class, but I was thinking about a familiar text in a new way. That\u2019s the excitement of this book. An author whose mind I had already admired \u2014 whose thinking I love being confounded by, love stenciling with, love getting lost in, love reciting, love trying to understand, love reading other people\u2019s attempts to understand \u2014 is being explored book by book by someone with the intellectual stamina and sense of rhythm to move with Morrison. Serpell can dance.ImageImageCredit...-The critical enterprise of \u201cOn Morrison\u201d corresponds with a quickening moral imperative to keep Morrison on our lips, to keep her lofty, stratospheric. The book grasps the forces that seek to reduce, overlook, discard these books, and not on the merits. The forces are old. I have a strong, pungent memory of watching Harold Bloom on Charlie Rose\u2019s old show \u2014 in, what, 1994? \u2014 holding forth about his Western canon project and inveighing, at some point, against Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Morrison, disparaging the artistic merit of their work. These were political writers. Bloom seemed most alarmed at what had, in his estimation, befallen Morrison.She \u201cbegan as a very strong writer and reached a kind of culmination in \u2018Song of Solomon,\u2019\u201d he informed Rose. \u201cUnfortunately, her sense of what she would call her responsibility to \u2014 she now calls herself, as you know, a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist and all of these things. \u2018Beloved\u2019 and \u2018Jazz,\u2019 even more than \u2018Beloved,\u2019 are, I think, top-heavy books with very strong political programs; they\u2019re not aesthetic accomplishments.\u201d He went on: \u201cShe has been, I believe, victimized by the times, in trying to give the age what she feels the age demands.\u201dWhat made \u201cSong of Solomon\u201d worthy to Bloom came down to his identification in it of a Western tradition. He could detect in her writing some Woolf, some Faulkner, and when he lost their trace in \u201cBeloved,\u201d the book lost him, because it ceased to obediently correspond with the traditional Western literary frameworks as erected by him. I have tried to read \u201cBeloved\u201d the way you would a \u201cregular\u201d masterpiece, but Morrison won\u2019t let me. As Serpell argues, something new was going on in \u201cBeloved,\u201d in its structure, its metaphysics, its intimidating instability.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTMorrison exposed Bloom\u2019s canon-blindness, inducing him to smash up and throw out what he hadn\u2019t been trained to know how to read. I think Morrison came to confound him. And \u201cpolitics\u201d was a convenient garbage chute to drop \u201cBeloved\u201d down. And yet: He, at least, took the novel seriously. (I also discovered my favorite poet from that \u201cCharlie Rose\u201d conversation: Thylias Moss.) Stanley Crouch, in a famously dyspeptic and fairly typical heave-ho, from 1987, declaimed \u201cBeloved\u201d a \u201cblackface Holocaust novel.\u201d He wrote more than that. But none of what he wrote lives up \u2014 or rather \u201cdown\u201d \u2014 to that triptych.Morrison seemed to handle the pans fine. It so happens that Knopf has just published, with notes and an introduction by the literary scholar and Princeton professor Claudia Brodsky, a new collection of Morrison\u2019s lectures on the great books: \u201cLanguage as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon.\u201d Nonetheless, that sort of criticism leads us to ship our geniuses, especially our Black woman geniuses, off to the upper reaches, to make them untouchable, to keep them out of harm\u2019s reach. This isn\u2019t to say that Morrison\u2019s work couldn\u2019t withstand the analytic force Serpell applies here to dismantle and unpack, as it were. Her work is richer for the vastness and intimacy of Serpell\u2019s reading. The question is how far down would a negative application of that kind of force even reach?Telling that toward the end of the book, it\u2019s Serpell who sharpens her knives, not for one of the novels but for, of all things, Morrison\u2019s poems, none of which I\u2019d read until now. They\u2019ve got the down-and-dirty stank you can find all over her fiction. Here, the erudition that had been making Serpell\u2019s book such a thrill wilts into a complaint about the offensive mediocrity of Morrison\u2019s verse. Serpell cuts because she cares, because she\u2019s curious (does this woman bleed?). But it also feels as if she cuts because she must: See the author of \u201cOn Morrison\u201d get really on Morrison! May she never again come this close to squatting near Stanley\u2019s Crouch.It is possible that Morrison has been overrated and overvalued, so that the meaning of the work \u2014 its complexity, its surprise, its daring, its impossibility \u2014 winds up overshadowed by the imposition of oracularity. Save us, Toni. Tell \u2019em, Toni. Show me, Toni. Out of novels to operate on, Serpell spends her latter pages thinking through her wariness of Morrison\u2019s monumentalization. Her book leaves you high because Morrison has passed this one particular critic and novelist\u2019s inspection. St. Toni holds up.This is not a book of cross words or intellectual counterargument. Let someone else write that book with all their heart. I dare them \u2014 be the unorthodoxy you hope to see. Serpell climbed an intellectual, scholastic, academic mountain and discovered what I imagine she already knew before reporting for duty. Morrison is up there for good reason.ON MORRISON | By Namwali Serpell | Hogarth | 369 pp. | $32Wesley Morris is a Times critic who writes about art and popular culture.See more on: Toni MorrisonShare full articleRelated ContentAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
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