I've really liked Song of Solomon as a book for many reasons, but probably the strongest is Morrison's ability to write interesting characters. From the beginning of the book I've been interested in how these people develop and what makes up their personalities. This makes the story jumps in the first half of the book very frustrating.
Although I understand that the book would be much longer if there was a more slow progression through the lives of these people, I feel almost cheated out of the character development and life-changing events that took place is the lost time. This feeling is probably at its highest when Milkman quickly jumps from age twelve to twenty-two within chapter 3. This skips over what some would consider the most important time for the development of character and takes out most of the discussion of "coming of age" (one of my favorite times for character development.) The depth of these characters in more continuous sections makes me certain that I've missed hundreds of crucial events in their development as people.
Now, although I find these early jumps confusing and misguided, I really enjoy some of the later jumps which utilize a different feeling of "in medias res". Take for example, the jump between chapters 4 and 5. We haven't skipped over too much time (about 6 months) and as we read, the narrative slowly fills in the details of what happened in the lost time. This draws the reader in and makes the events much more exciting to unravel. This is very different from the earlier jumps in progression, where the lost time is viewed as unimportant and barely even worth alluding to.
Although I find these characters to be rich and interesting to follow, I still can't help but wish that the earlier section breaks had not jumped over so much time that could have been interesting to the reader. Maybe if the jumps had been smoother and more polished, I would feel less perplexed by there exclusions. Even still, the book becomes much more engaging once these jumps become more minor and explained.
1 comment:
You'd think we would be "skipping over" Milkman's "coming of age" by leapfrogging his late teen years and his twenties--but, happily, he's still living like an adolescent at 31, and we still have a variation on a classic coming-of-age novel. (And note how these jumps settle down after the first five or six chapters--by part 2, our narrative "present" is pretty linear and straightforward, but then Milkman himself is delving into the past, exploring the hidden stories of his family.
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