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 American’s “mind on fire,” causing jewel-bright hardback copies, followed by glittering rows of paperbacks, to replicate like dragon’s teeth on the shelves of a thousand bookstores, touching off aesthetic conflagrations in a million gringo skulls that had never, in their wildest fantasies of world domination through advanced technology, dreamed of an enchantment like the new Latin American novel.

Hey, this magic realism stuff is easy, once you get the hang of it.

Toni Morrison would never put it that way. But you can bet she was impressed back in 1970, when her tentative but promising first novel, The Bluest Eye, was blown to obscurity by the firestorm of García Márquez. Almost immediately, she got the hang of magic realism. By 1981 she told The New Republic that “in general I think the South American novelists have the best of it now,” and The New Republic credited her fiction with “a Latin American enchantment.”

From the obscurity of 1970, Morrison has emerged as a