SOURCE: Mantel, Hilary. “Ghost Writer.” New Statesman 132, no. 4667 (8 December 2003): 50-1.

In the following review, Mantel provides a plot synopsis of Morrison's Love, and offers a favorable assessment of the novel.

Toni Morrison has said in interviews that readers sometimes ask her: “Why don't you write about white people?” You could come off your ground and on to ours, they suggest; because you are an artist you “transcend” divisions. They mean to flatter her; yet what they mean is both insulting and absurd. No group has a bigger share in the power of narrative than any other. All Morrison's work exists to remind us of this. The cultural default position is still “white, male”, but Morrison has shown through her distinguished career that there are other eyes to look through and other mouths through which to speak, and that these visions and discourses are in no way “alternative”; if...