Song of Solomon gives me PTSD to A Prayer for Owen Meany

The start of AP English was rough for me. A Prayer for Owen Meany, the first book that we had to read, was a major miss. I hated it, causing me to majorly procrastinate on my reading. Every time I finally did open it, I would invariably slam it shut after some character said or did something incredibly inane or absurd. After A Prayer for Owen Meany, however, I enjoyed or at the very least tolerated the required reading. But Song of Solomon gave me PTSD to A Prayer for Owen Meany. (Both are oddly sexualized when they really don’t need to be.)I found myself waiting till the last minute to do the reading (I only finished the book at 9:30 tonight) and skimming it just to get it over with. I thought the novel was set in Georgia when it was set in Michigan. That is how much I just did not care about Song of Solomon.

Let’s start with the characters, specifically Milkman. He got his name after Freddie caught his mother Ruth nursing him far past the acceptable age because she got sexual pleasure from it, so there’s problem number one. Problem number two is that he’s a petulant, hypocritical, and entitled daddy’s boy. He derives all his sense of confidence and authority from his father’s prestige and money. He throws Hagar away like a used toy with no regard for her feelings when he tires of her. Makes it so Corinthians can’t spend time with Porter because of his affiliation with the Days, yet he still confides in and is friends with Guitar. Because of his father’s status, he treats everyone around him with little respect and rarely tries to see things from their point of view. To be fair, he is the main protagonist and he does have a character arc, so he grows out of some of these characteristics. He grows to tire of his father’s influence and journeys to Virginia to find himself and his family. He’s less selfish and more considerate of others. He returns to the woman he has sex with and says goodbye to her instead of just discarding her. And like the 30-year-old big boy he is, he takes the giant step out of his father’s shadow into his grandfather’s instead. Sarcasm aside, he does have some actual character growth and realizes what a jerk he has been to the others in his life. That said when he finally returns home to Pilate after his journey he doesn’t try to atone for or even apologize for his hand in Hagar’s death. Instead, he tells Pilate that she needs to bury her father’s bones, and Pilate, who spent three pages keening over Hagar’s dead body, just forgives him because he brings her some of Hagar’s hair??? I understand that this is important information that Milkman wanted to share and that Pilate would want to know, but Hagar’s death feels like it should have more of an effect on characters than this. It felt rushed, like Toni Morrison didn’t really want to deal with Hagar’s death and just wanted to get to the ending.

And that brings me to probably my least favorite part — the ending. Wasowski warned us that some of us would hate the ending, but, somehow, it still caught me off guard how much I hated the ending and frankly just didn’t understand it. So apparently, Guitar thinks that Milkman stole the gold and is refusing to give Guitar his cut as promised. Like any rational person would he decides to kill Milkman in response. (That’s an oversimplification, I realize that, but it shows how absurd it felt to me.) Pilate and Milkman are back in the cave burying the first Macon Dead when Guitar shoots her and she just dies. Milkman, knowing Guitar is going to shoot him, either leaps toward Guitar or off a cliff, and he learns the secret of flying that his great grandfather Solomon supposedly knew when he flew back to Africa. It’s unclear to me which one it is, and frankly I don’t care either way because both leave the entire plot of Guitar and the Seven Days, the only part of the book I found remotely interesting, entirely unresolved. One way or another Milkman is most likely going to die, but don’t worry he now knows the secret of flight that his great grandfather once knew! The ending felt rushed and pointless to me. It didn’t resolve anything, and I hated it with a passion.

I recognize that I probably wasn’t the right audience for this, and that I probably didn’t go into this book with the right mindset, but I really did not like this book. It made me hate AP English reading which is something that hadn’t happened since A Prayer for Owen Meany. I really hope I enjoy Little Fires more than Song of Solomon. Otherwise I fear that I’ll become the person who only sparknotes the novel instead of doing the reading.