The dazzling, difficult art of Toni Morrison

Is there a literary figure more untouchable than the late Toni Morrison? She was unapologetically “difficult”, both in her persona – which lives on in social media in the form of clips of all those blistering takedowns of hapless interviewers with their nonsensical questions about race – and in her novels, which require you to submit to an intellectual and psychological engagement that isn’t for the faint-hearted.

Her novels necessitate revisiting – each time challenging you to become a better reader. Neither the books nor the woman suffered fools gladly. You can hear Morrison’s famous hauteur in every line she wrote. Yet it’s well earned, befitting a writer who repurposed the canon to elevate those who had previously been excluded. Not for nothing did she win the Nobel prize.

Namwali Serpell’s new book, On Morrison, advertised as a “journey” through Morrison’s oeuvre, seeks to deepen our understanding of this monumental writer. It opens with a declaration: “There are many ways to be difficult in this world. You can be demanding, inconvenient, complicated, troublesome, baffling, illegible. Black womanhood is one place where all these forms of difficulty overlap.” Hell, yes. If you’re a black woman who has ever been called difficult, those words beckon you into this book like a literary welcome mat. But anyone interested in great literature is welcome here – even if you’re new to Morrison – though it will be a much richer experience if you’ve read her first.

Serpell shows us how to read her “with the seriousness that she deserves”, investigating how the work’s ethos of difficulty explains its excellence, avoiding the wrong turn made by so many other critics who have read it as “merely representative, in both the tokenistic and identitarian senses of the word”. There is arguably no one on the planet better placed to do this than Serpell. Professor of English at Harvard University and a highly acclaimed novelist and critic in her own right, Serpell is an expert as well as a fan, who approaches the task with impressive academic rigour but also a feeling akin to filial love. In addition, as she points out, her own biography as a mixed-race Zambian woman who grew up in the US means that, like Morrison, she too “lucked into the privilege of zooming out from or boomeranging around race”, which I read as an explanation for how they both escaped what she describes as “that omnipresent fog, the white gaze”. (Morrison herself credited the influence of African writers such as Chinua Achebe for this freedom in her own work.)

Only such a confluence of author and subject could have produced a book this singular. At one point, Serpell contends that in her 1992 novel Jazz, Morrison came as close as anyone ever did to making a novel that was music. “[She] was less concerned about telling the story of jazz, or telling a story about jazz,” Serpell writes. “She wanted to tell a story as jazz.” Reading this line, it struck me that On Morrison is criticism as jazz, in the sense that it is also seemingly infinite in range, breathtakingly original, improvisational and self-aware. Serpell’s own prose is not just erudite – it is playful. In this particular chapter alone, she riffs on Jazz’s “metafictional project […] to make the sonic, symbolic and material workings of verbal communication manifest all at once”; returns to the fact that its very first word – “Sth” – is a “recognisably black”, teeth-sucking sound that “kisses its way across songs, plays, movies, and novels about the Afrodiasporic experience”; and offers us a bit of music herself, not just through her unerring choice of quotation but also in the way she condenses, excavates and juxtaposes Morrison’s writing to make something new.

Take the way in which she puts the novel’s description of New York through an intellectual sieve that reduces and thickens it, drawing our attention to “the alliteration of smoothing its sidewalks, correcting its curbstones, a clarinet coughs, waiting for the woman”, demonstrating how the musicality of Morrison’s language made for some of her “most gorgeous prose”, and in the process, generating a gleaming little found poem in the middle of the text. From The Bluest Eye (“not just an identitarian sob story but also a work of art”) to A Mercy (which “reflects the way late works often stymie closure and refuse clarity”), Serpell works through Morrison’s catalogue, sometimes at speed, sometimes methodically, as if she is an archaeologist uncovering the bones of Morrison’s brilliance.

Turning her attention to Morrison’s style as a critic, Serpell links “dragging”, “throwing shade” and “reading” (in the colloquial sense) as versions of the African American cultural practice of “signifying” (“a black artform of insult that prizes accuracy over tact”) that often grounded Morrison’s approach. “Morrison doesn’t just deliver a critical reading of American literature,” Serpell argues, “she gives it a read.” As an example, she cites Morrison’s 1972 review of Regina Nadelson’s biography of Angela Davis (Who Is Angela Davis?), which opened with a put-down that reads like the literary version of a Kendrick Lamar diss track: “Who is Regina Nadelson and why is she behaving like [Uncle Tom’s Cabin author] Harriet Beecher Stowe, another simpatico white girl who felt she was privy to the secret of how black revolutionaries got that way?”

Speaking of dragging, On Morrison is at its most entertaining when Serpell starts throwing shade herself. The line: “Quiet as it’s kept, Toni Morrison’s poetry is not good,” made me laugh out loud. Love is only love when it’s honest, and Serpell’s “read” of Morrison is reliable because it is unsparing. “Reading” such as this is an insider’s art, a “loving, brutal, interactive dance”. In another amusing passage, she borrows Patricia Lockwood’s idea of laying out Nabokov’s “tics” on a bingo card to set out a few of Morrison’s, including: “Am I a ghost?”; “Gratuitous scatology”; and “The narrator got me wrong again.” We believe her appraisal of Morrison’s genius, because she’s astute enough to identify its occasional flaws.

In On Morrison’s first chapter, Serpell claims her book offers “a version of the advanced and slow alchemy that turns reading into writing, the relay of human imaginations through language that [Morrison] once called ‘one’s own mind dancing with another’s’.” Hell, yes. On Morrison reveals two brilliant minds locked in precisely that kind of loving dance. I did not expect reading this learned work of literary criticism to be some of the most fun I’ve had this year.

On Morrison by Namwali Serpell is published by Chatto & Windus (£25). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £21.25. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Todd Plitt/Getty Images