The Morrison/Kakutani catfight enters its latest phase:
But while there are some beautifully observed passages in this book, where the author's distinctive style (forged into something new from such disparate influences as Faulkner, Ellison, Woolf and García Márquez) takes over, the story as a whole reads like a gothic soap opera, peopled by scheming, bitter women and selfish, predatory men: women engaged in cartoon-violent catfights; men catting around and going to cathouses.
And, of course, as one better than myself has previously pointed out for us:
Part of the problem is that Ms. Morrison employs the sort of didactic language she used in the ham-handed "Paradise" to limn [Emphasis gratuitiously added by TEV] the women's relationships to each other and to Bill Cosey. Blunt analogies are drawn between slavery and the marriage — "Well, it's like we started out being sold, got free of it, then sold ourselves to the highest bidder" — and broad generalizations are made about race and sex and class.