Without doubt, Alice Walker's latest novel is her most impressive. No mean accomplishment, since her previous books … have elicited almost unanimous praise for Miss Walker as a lavishly gifted writer. "The Color Purple," while easily satisfying that claim, brings into sharper focus many of the diverse themes that threaded their way through her past work….

Most prominent [of the book's major themes] is the estrangement and violence that mark the relationships between Miss Walker's black men and women….

[Miss Walker has] dealt with [this] subject before. In her collection "You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down," two stories ("Porn" and "Coming Apart") assess the sexual disaffection among black couples. And the saintly heroine of the novel "Meridian" is deserted by a black lover who then marries a white civil-rights worker, whom he also later abandons. In "Meridian," however, the friction between black men and women is merely one...