Paule Marshall is, I think, one of the best novelists writing in the United States. She has form, style and immense mastery of words. She writes with all her senses as well as with her acute and probing mind. Sometimes I feel she is almost too gifted—or rather, that this plethora of riches is a bit too much on display and needs a sharper restraint….

In "The Chosen Place, the Timeless People" she is writing about an island in the Caribbean which is a piece of land but also a state of mind. To the demographer, the anthropologist, the sociologist, who have come to carry out a research development project, the island is a challenge to their best technical training, to their enlightened expertise, and to their humaneness which is very much engaged in action.

But there is an element here which the whites from the United...