We've got your back. With the Tough-O-Meter, you'll know whether to bring extra layers or Swiss army knives as you summit the literary mountain. (10 = Toughest)
(7) Snow Line
The language isn't the toughest in the world, but Toni Morrison's Tar Baby can totally tie your brain in knots.
It's pretty easy to get lost on the foggy shore of Isle des Chevaliers, it's just as easy to get lost in the gray areas of Tar Baby. All but the most masochistic reader usually wants to search for the moral center or guiding light, but this novel doesn't ever deliver the goods. Tar Baby doesn't tell you what to think. It doesn't even give you a helping hand.
What is does give you are details, details, details about its characters. And like the details of a real-life human being (and a real hero), they are often contradictory and confusing. You're meant to be confused: it's part of Morrison's aim of making Tar Baby super lifelike.
Just keep repeating the mantra that it's not you, it's the novel. You're not being dense or reading things wrong. The characters really are ever-changing, morally opaque, and just plain weird. And it doesn't help that a whole lot of the events of the book are relayed through dialogue: dialogue spoken by these weirdo characters.
Above all, remember that you're in good hands with Toni Morrison. This Nobel Prize-winner isn't going to leave you in the lurch… although she does want to challenge your ideas about right and wrong. Whenever Tar Baby seems like it's getting just too confusing, Toni Morrison reins it in and gives her reader some clarity.