Literary critic Gurleen Grewal notes that Song of Solomon reverberates alongside novels that have documented and refashioned cultural and ethical identities in America since the 1970s: Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and Peter Najerian’s Voyages. In such novels, “characters’ self-hatred and angry confusion are related to a historic dispossession and to a psyche cut off from ancestral or communal wellsprings; their narratives chart a moving and powerful repossession of selfhood, articulating personal well-being in terms of the collective” (63).This is one of the distractive novels in which the pastoral is represented both in its pristine and transformed racialized version. It
