One of the most exciting things about delving into good criticism is the pleasure of encountering innovative and thought-provoking readings of books you thought you knew so well. Tessa Roynon's new book, Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition, is one such delight. Written in straightforward, easy-to-follow prose, Roynon's adventure into the classical underpinnings of Morrison's work is erudite but not intimidating, unless, like me, you are impressed by the scope of her knowledge and the organizational power to pull it all together in only seven highly readable chapters. This is not to say that it is an easy haul: Roynon combines her extensive knowledge of the classical world with an excellent background in American literature and a familiarity with texts across a wide variety of disciplines, from poetry and prose to psychiatry and architecture, and even a nod to Mozart. (Indeed, her “Introduction” should be obligatory reading for students of black literature, especially if it is paired with Justine Baillie's own introduction to her recent Toni Morrison and the Literary Tradition (2013).) While her intellectual relationships with many twentieth-century authors from Faulkner and William Carlos Williams to Ralph Ellison and Willa Cather are certainly noted, they are always brought into the discussion as part of the ever-deepening palimpsest, with the classical works as their urtexts. Sometimes Roynon's discussion is so full of intertextual references that it demands its own careful close reading in order to elicit its full potential. In and of itself the volume is a challenging read, but it has the unusual virtue of enticing a reader not only to reread Morrison's entire oeuvre in light of this new approach but also to return to the Greek and Roman texts themselves with a greater understanding of just how important this tradition has been for the Nobel Prize-winner.

Roynon's analytical writing is based on a vast classical, historical, and literary background complemented with meticulous close readings of the author's novels, but always carried out with a specific “political” intent, that of illuminating Morrison's intentional intellectual efforts in mounting a direct challenge to an Enlightenment worldview based on its own classical foundations. Moreover, each chapter not only summarizes the thrust of the arguments but also prepares the reader for the following one. Rather than structuring the volume around the chronological production of the novels, Roynon has centered the discussions in each chapter around defining moments in American historiography (chronologically developed in accord with the nation's own history) and the classical myths that have informed them: “Discovery, Conquest, and Settlement,” “The New England Colonies and the Founding of the New Nation,” “Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction,” “In Search of Home: The 1920s–1950s,” “Fighting for Rights: From Emmett Till's Murder to the Ronald Reagan Years.” This means that the inclusion of certain novels is based on their relevance for each theme. Chapter 6 goes beyond the scope of the original conception by exploring the close relationship of Africa and the classical world and including Morrison's rereadings of Aesop's fables in her short-story collaboration with her son Slade, among others. This “contamination” of the historical legacy illustrates that the Classics (and subsequent Western literature) were from the start neither pure nor white (as illustrated in the “messiness” of the Nag Hammadi).

Roynon is at her best in the more extended discussions of direct relationships, such as in understanding the Oven of Paradise as the koine hestia, for example, or in engaging the Bacchae with both Schechner's controversial Dionysus in 69 and Wole Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides to illuminate Morrison's critique in Song of Solomon of the “disordered violence on which the maintenance of ‘law and order’ depends” (133). Reading this text in the shadow of the tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri once again makes both Morrison's novel and Roynon's explication painfully relevant. And while I am unconvinced by Home's narrator being described as one and the same as the zoot-suited man, I do agree that certain critics' dismissal of Home as a “novella” is premature at the least. Roynon's study of its relationship with the Iliad and the Odyssey does much to belie that view. Given the wide breadth of inclusion, however, it is somewhat puzzling that there is no mention at all of Desdemona, Morrison's foray into reinterpreting Othello's tragic heroine.

Dr. Roynon has for years struggled to make Toni Morrison's voice “heard” in the halls of Oxbridge. This volume is a compelling defense of the author's international renown and a solid argument for her inclusion in academic syllabi of a wide range of university courses.