American literary scholar Arnold Weinstein writes in Recovering Your Story:

Toni Morrison is unquestionably the great inheritor of the giant figures of the early twentieth century—Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner; she is the proof that what they wrought is still going strong. Time, consciousness, history, the inside story: All this is at the heart of her fiction, even if it seems sea-changed . … If Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner speak to us of the heart’s secrets and the dimensions of the self, Toni Morrison dares to go still further inside, to a time and a place before we were individuated, to the red heart that fuels humankind and signals our connectedness to one another.