Although galleys of Toni Morrison's Love herald it as a "major new novel," the book is in fact one of her slighter efforts. Certainly it is more engaging than Paradise, her flatfooted and highly schematic 1998 novel, but at the same time it lacks the magic and mythic ambition of her 1987 masterpiece, Beloved, and the bravura blending of the ordinary and the fablelike that distinguished her earlier fiction.
Much of Love reads like an awkward retread of Sula and Tar Baby combined: Once again, we are given a story about the long relationship of two women who have known each other since childhood; once again, we are given a story about a dysfunctional family living in what was once a seeming paradise.
All of Morrison's perennial themes are here: lost innocence and the hold that time past exerts over time present; the sufferings sustained by black women at the hands of black men; the fallout that social change and changing attitudes toward race can have on a small community; the possibility of redemption, if past grievances and hurts can somehow be left behind.
While there are some beautifully observed passages in this book, where the author's distinctive style (forged into something new from such disparate influences as Faulkner, Ellison, Woolf and Garcia Marquez) takes over, the story as a whole reads like a gothic soap opera, peopled by scheming, bitter women and selfish, predatory men: women engaged in cartoon-violent catfights; men catting around and going to cathouses.
The touches of surrealism in Love (a dead woman reminiscing from beyond the grave, talking of "Police-heads -- dirty things with big hats who shoot up out of the ocean to harm loose women and eat disobedient children") feel like garnishes, sprinkled on as an afterthought. The novel's sporadic references to racial politics and America's evolving social mores also feel like gratuitous add-ons, penciled in later in an effort to lend this claustrophobic drama some extra dimension and heft.
As in many of Morrison's novels, the story in these pages is told from several points of view that cut back and forth in time. It is an approach that results in a deliberately elliptical narrative, intended to create an aura of mystery while withholding from the reader certain crucial secrets about the characters' pasts.
The central figure in Love is a well-to-do man named Bill Cosey who once presided over "the best and best-known vacation spot for colored folk on the East Coast" -- a hotel that flourished in the 1940s and that later, in the wake of integration and new opportunities, began to founder. We are given contradictory glimpses of Cosey from people who worked for him, idolized him, resented him or loved him. An old fishing companion thinks that the more he "learned about the man, the less he knew."
A former employee says "he helped more colored people here than 40 years of government programs." One of his many women describes him as "old, selfish, skirt-chasing," while another
testifies to more sinister behavior.
The hotel has long been shuttered, Cosey is dead and buried, and for many years his home has been occupied by two women who detest each other: Heed, who decades ago became his child-bride; and Christine, who after many years of exile returned to claim her legacy as "the last, the only, blood relative of William Cosey."
As Cosey apparently left no will, the two women have been locked in a war of attrition that seems to have no end. That all changes one day with the arrival of a cunning girl named Junior, who has answered a help wanted ad, surreptitiously placed in a newspaper by Heed. Junior begins an intense affair with Romen, a neighbor boy who has been doing chores around the Cosey house, and she realizes that Heed plans to enlist her help in thwarting Christine's plans to get a lawyer to secure her inheritance.
The two old foes' confrontation will force them both to reappraise the past: their own tangled relationship, as well as the roles that Cosey and Christine's paranoid mother, May (who was married to Cosey's son), played in igniting and fueling their feud.
There is genuine pathos to the stories of the women in this novel, but Morrison never manages to make the more violent emotions that connect Heed and Christine palpable -- or comprehensible -- to the reader. Even when all their secrets have been unraveled, it is hard to comprehend why they harbor such homicidal rage toward each other -- a "hatred so pure, so solemn, it feels beautiful, almost holy."
Part of the problem is that Morrison employs the sort of didactic language she used in the ham-handed Paradise to limn the women's relationships to each other and to Bill Cosey. Blunt analogies are drawn between slavery and the marriage -- "Well, it's like we started out being sold, got free of it, then sold ourselves to the highest bidder" -- and broad generalizations are made about race and sex and class.
In Morrison's finest work, these same issues are dramatized with hallucinatory clarity and power. In this haphazard novel, they all too often sit there inertly on the page, like cumbersome subtitles to her characters' stories.
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