A novel that harbors an intelligent revolutionary politics and a compassionate, penetrating humanism is an event in any time. If the time is now, if the revolution is black, if the compassion transcends race, it is a freak or a miracle, depending on whether or not you trust it. I trust "The Chosen Place, the Timeless People." I think it is an important and moving book. And Paule Marshall seems to me as wise as she is bold, for in compromising neither her politics nor her understanding of people, she makes better sense of both….
I was surprised at the quiet of this novel's reception until I discovered how difficult it is to write about. In many ways that matter to me, it is not extraordinary, but in two months I haven't stopped recommending it and—daily—thinking about it. Its form is in no way original, but the old bottle is blown wider to hold more kinds of wine: through the consciousness of its major characters the Jewish novel and the black novel meet, and the WASP gets almost equal time. I know of no serious contemporary novel attempting this synthesis—it almost constitutes a new form. The prose is workmanlike and rarely soars, but marvelously evokes West Indian place and speech and provides an unusually haunting experience. And although it does not forge a new black sensibility, neither is it a white folks' story…. It deals with all of us, in all our kinds, where we are now and how we stand with each other. It sums up. It casts some things we know intermittently in a durable mold so we can know them better. The Invisible Man of Ralph Ellison says, contrasting blacks to whites, that blacks are "older than they in the sense of what it took to live in the world with others," and in this sense only a black author is old enough to dispense this vision. It is a ripe, ripe book—I guess it is a classic. (p. 6)
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