Questions & Answers

The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. "Tar Baby," audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones-of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people.The place is a Caribbean island. In their mansion overlooking the sea, the cultivated millionaire Valerian Street, now retired, and his pretty, younger wife, Margaret, go through the rituals of living, as if in a trance. It is the black servant couple, who have been with the Streets for years-the fastidious butler, Sydney, and his strong yet remote wife-who have arranged every detail of existence to create a surface calm broken only by sudden burst of verbal sparring between Valerian and his wife. And there is a visitor among them-a beautiful young black woman, Jadine, who isKathie Sweeney is the author of 'Questions & Answers' with ISBN 9780737305128 and ISBN 0737305126.