The life depicted in Toni Morrison's earlier novels drew its strength from her flawless recollection of a cherished and painful past. Tar Baby is set not on the writer's native ground but on a French island in the Caribbean where she, too, is only a tourist, and the novel seems to have been designed more as a vehicle for bitter judgments than as a reflective rendering of memory. This may account for its disjointed tone, its florid language, and the incongruity of its parts: a lush tropic locale; a gorgeously romantic and doomed love story; a melodramatic family scandal; and the harsh indictment of white civilization that washes over it all.

Tar Baby introduces white characters for the first time—Valerian Street, the wealthy candy manufacturer who paid for Jadine's education, and his wife Margaret, a former Miss Maine with a terrible secret…. [Valerian is] self-mocking, quirky, and...