Toni Morrison Critical Reviews
Toni Morrison: a writer who “enlarged the American imagination in ways we are only beginning to understand.” Read our critic’s appreciation. ‘All of us, bound by something we could not. 'BELOVED' is Toni Morrison's fifth novel, and another triumph. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, 'Beloved' will put them to rest. Author Toni Morrison leads an assembly of her peers, critics and colleagues on an exploration of race, history, America and the human condition.
Love
by Toni Morrison
212pp, Chatto & Windus, £16.99
Nobel Prize winner, Princeton professor, Oprah Book Club best-seller - Toni Morrison long ago reached that peak of literary veneration at which her regal, high-priestess face alone is sufficient adornment for the covers of her books. No less a literary critic than Morrison herself has pronounced her new novel, Love, to be 'perfect', and despite offering such glaring incitements to the would-be critical gunslinger, Love is a disarmingly compact, unpompous book, less in love with the sound of its own metaphors than Morrison's last novel, Paradise (1998), and full of quirky, perverse characters and provocative, unfashionable ideas.
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Love continues Morrison's project of exploring African-American history and culture. It is set at Cosey's Hotel and Resort, 'the best and best-known vacation spot for coloured folk on the East Coast'. Founded in the depression, on a site like the Sea Islands off Georgia, Cosey's flourished because it offered prosperous black clients a place to holiday in style without fear of discrimination. But after integration, the resort declined: 'Fact is, folks who bragged about Cosey vacations in the 1940s boasted in the 1960s about Hyatts, Hiltons, cruises to the Bahamas, and Ocho Rios.'
By the time the novel opens, in the 1990s, Cosey's has long disappeared, a casualty of the civil-rights movement and black upward mobility. Without denying the necessary gains of integration, Morrison has commented in an interview on its simultaneous costs to the black community: 'There were these fabulous black schools, high schools, insurance companies, resorts, and the business class was very much involved. They had worked very hard to have their own resorts outside Detroit and New Jersey where they were all black and very upscale. Those stores are gone; those hotels are gone.' Her elegy for the vital black society that was lost with desegregation has parallels in the Jewish-American experience of the great resorts of the Catskills, or even the Butlins holidays that reassured the British working-class before package tours abroad; and anyone who mourns the passing of the Borscht Belt comedians and the knees-up, or similar rituals of the ethnic conclave, will identify with her nostalgia, although she does not invite such identification.
On to this relatively familiar setting, Morrison layers a lurid and intricate family history, and braids the cultural background with stories of love and hate in a narrative style influenced by García Márquez and Faulkner. Indeed, one of her locales is called Sooker Bay - the debased form of Sucre Bay - recalling the Sugre of García Márquez's Colombia. Love is the tale of several women connected by their love or dependence on the deceased Bill Cosey, the charismatic entrepreneur who owned the hotel; his effect on their lives is slowly unfolded in sections called Portrait, Friend, Stranger, Benefactor, Lover, Husband, Guardian and Father.
Among them are his former cook, L (perhaps short for Love?), who provides a choral commentary on the story; his mysterious, scarred, sporting-woman lover, Celestial; and especially his daughter-in-law May, his granddaughter Christine, and his second wife, Heed. These three ageing, angry women live together in the decaying mansion Cosey left to May, the frailest, who 'was convinced that civil rights destroyed her family and its business. By which she meant that black people were more interested in blowing up cities than in dancing'.
There is a subplot about the ambiguous circumstances of Cosey's death, his secret affair with Celestial, and his will. But we gradually come to understand that the deepest love story in Love is between Christine and Heed, who met as little girls on the beach, and formed a pre-sexual bond cruelly destroyed when Cosey decided to take the 11-year-old Heed as his child bride. More or less sold to the old man by her shiftless parents, the illiterate Heed learns to be a lady and to fight with Christine for primacy in the Cosey family; as adults their childhood roles are reversed, with Heed the heiresss and Christine her servant. Their relationship is almost gothic in its ferocity and passion, as if they were African-American female versions of Cathy and Heathcliff.
That love is mirrored by a sadomasochistic affair between a local boy, Romen, and a tough reform-school girl, Junior, who both work for Heed (the pair are a kind of Romeo and Juliet). In 'Father', the section mainly devoted to Christine's past, Morrison condenses material that would easily provide a dozen novels for another writer, especially Christine's fascinating experiences as a GI bride in Germany, and as the lover of a black 60s radical named Fruit. In the hands of, say, Philip Roth, this life history would afford opportunities for rich, sardonic and profound reflection on human experience in the 20th century, beyond nationality, race, sex, age, class, and ethnicity. Morrison's imaginative range of identification is narrower by choice; although she would no doubt argue - and rightly - that African-American characters can speak for all humanity. But in Love, they do not; they are stubbornly bound by their own culture; and thus, while Love is certainly an accomplished novel, its perfection comes from its limitation.
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· Elaine Showalter's books include Inventing Herself (Picador).