SOURCE: “Special Effects, Special Pleading,” in The New Criterion, Vol. 6, No. 5, January, 1988, pp. 34-40.

In the following essay, Bayles argues that Toni Morrison's use of magic realism led her to ignore her greatest strengths as a novelist and caused her work to be mediocre at best.

Eighteen years later, as he gazed out over the literary landscape, the swaggering, mustachioed Colombian called Gabriel García Márquez was to recall the remote afternoon when he slipped his magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, into the wax-cold, ink-smudged hands of a New York Times literary critic whose mother had named him John Leonard, and a great event happened that neither García Márquez's kindly mother nor the white-haired Mrs. Leonard could have foreseen, namely the Colombian's words set the North America's “mind on fire,” causing jewel-bright hardback copies, followed by glittering rows of paperbacks, to replicate like...