Omari Weeks at Bookforum:
On Morrison, Namwali Serpell’s foray into the expanding field of Morrison scholarship, picks up where these previous monographs left off. Serpell, an award-winning fiction writer and critic and professor of English at Harvard, meticulously pored over archival materials made accessible by the Morrison estate and Princeton University to produce a breathtaking excavation of the inner workings and outer impression of a swaggering Black genius. With this book, Serpell extends Mayberry’s research on Morrison’s critical reception by providing more critical reception of Morrison’s fiction and nonfiction oeuvre. She adds further grist to Williams’s careful exploration of what percolated just below Morrison’s famously steely surface. Altogether, On Morrison homes a novelist-critic’s eye in on a novelist-critic’s body of work and not only considers the beautiful world-building that has enamored publics for decades but does so with attention steeped in the craft of Black virtuosity.
For many reasons, Serpell’s magisterial deep dive into the output of one of the most profound writers of all time should not work. The breadth contained in her subject can petrify even the most seasoned reader; setting out to cover it in its entirety risks resorting to dull platitudes in the face of overwhelming precision.
more here.
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