Scholarship on the work of Toni Morrison is abundant, to say the least: between 2000 and 2006 alone, she was the subject of over three hundred books and journal articles, and of more than 150 Ph.D. dissertations. Amid this critical frenzy, Mayberry's Can't I Love What I Criticize? stands out as refreshingly original in that it takes the author's male characters, and the subject of African American masculinity, as its subject. The work's central claims for Morrison's oeuvre are twofold. First, Mayberry argues, the author's “review of masculinity suggests black men [have] successfully retained their special vitality in spite of white male resistance” (1); second, “her treatment of her male characters becomes a key to her success in countering the temptations of exclusionary feminism” (2).

The opening chapter comprises a confident overview of recent developments in race and gender theory, and in the burgeoning field of African American masculinity studies in particular. The critic's combination of the sociological and/or psychological perspectives of (among others) Clyde Franklin (1994, 2001), Richard Majors (1992, 1994), Marlon Ross (2004), Maurice Wallace (2002) and Michael Gurian (1998) with the literary analyses of Nellie McKay (1988), Henry Louise Gates Jr. (1988) and Jeffrey Leak (2005) is indicative of her belief in the political efficacy, the “real-world” engagement of Morrison's fiction. She finds within the novels both the conviction that black men's “connections to black women have saved their lives” and an accordance with bell hooks's perception that “a reconstruction and transformation of … masculinity is a necessary and essential part of feminist revolution” (1, 3).

In its subsequent chapter-by-chapter of analysis each novel (from The Bluest Eye to Love) in turn, the book is helpfully organized and comprehensive, and Mayberry's prose is witty and highly readable. One of her great strengths is her commitment to the thorough close reading, the painstaking exploration of allusiveness, that Morrison's fiction demands and rewards. Her redirection of the critical gaze to the apparent peripheries that the male characters (Song of Solomon excepting) inhabit is itself Morrisonian in spirit and effect, in that like the novels it reveals the actual centrality of the purportedly marginal. Her detailed exploration of minor characters whom I had previously barely noticed – Mr. Yacobowski in The Bluest Eye, Woodruff in Beloved (1987), Knox Sinclair in Love (2003) – yields significant insights about the fiction's key concerns. At a recent reading in Cheltenham (October 2008), Morrison herself said it was her so-called secondary characters who had come to interest her most. In Mayberry's work, the attention to the men who populate the Convent women's pre-Convent worlds in Paradise (1998) is particularly illuminating. The focus on the significantly named Frank Albright, Manley Gibson and Milton Truelove is a welcome redress of the conventional critical preoccupation with the citizens of Ruby.

Mayberry could have reinforced her literary analysis by referring more frequently than she does, as the book proceeds, to the theoretical foundations that she lays down in the first chapter. And the application of Lacanian theory in the early discussion of Love, though interesting in itself, is somewhat unexpected in that psychoanalytical thought does not inform the critic's approach significantly until that final chapter. It is also surprising, though presumably deliberate, that she does not make greater use of certain details of Morrison's biography which, in my opinion, have influenced aspects of the fiction such as the depiction of Mr. Henry in The Bluest Eye or the choice of the title Song of Solomon.

In its broad outlook, however, this monograph will provoke Morrison scholars into reassessments of the oeuvre, while its close attention to detail will prove invaluable to undergraduates who might be working on only one or two novels. It debates spiritedly with other recent critical work on the author, and the comparisons it draws between Morrison and John Webster, Emily Dickinson and D. H. Lawrence as well as Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright are long overdue. I look forward to what Mayberry has to say about Morrison's just-published novel A Mercy (2008).