Kirkus Reviews in March 1981 stated: "Morrison's fine-tuned, high-strung characters this time—black and white Americans caught up together in a "wide and breezy" house on a Caribbean island—may lack the psychic wingspread of Sula or Milkman of Song of Solomon. Yet within the swift of her dazzlingly mythic/animistic fancies, and dialogue sharp as drum raps, they carry her speculations—about black and white relationships and black female identity—as lightly as racing silks. ... Scouring contemporary insights—in prose as lithe and potent as vines in a rain forest."[1]
In The New York Times, novelist John Irving wrote of Tar Baby: "...Toni Morrison's greatest accomplishment is that she has raised her novel above the social realism that too many black novels and women's novels are trapped in. She has succeeded in writing about race and women symbolically."[2]
