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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