Robert Towers, writing in the New York Review of Books, concluded that on the evidence of The Color Purple "Alice Walker still has a lot to learn about plotting and structuring what is clearly 6 intended to be a realistic novel." His opinion was shared by many reviewers, who pointed out variously that in the last third of the book the narrator-protagonist Celie and her friends are propelled toward a fairytale happy ending with more velocity than credibility; that the letters from Nettie, with their disconcertingly literate depictions of life in an African village, intrude into the middle of the main action with little apparent motivation or warrant; and that the device of the letters to God is especially unrealistic inasmuch as it foregoes the concretizing details that traditionally have given the epistolatory form its peculiar verisimilitude: the secret writing-place,the cache, the ruses to enable posting letters, and especially the letters received in return.
