What Love?

Love a novel by Toni Morrison.  Vintage.  202 pp. $15.00

I was sitting down to write about her eighth novel—I’ve been reading her work chronologically, ever since I saw Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am—when I heard the news that Toni Morrison had died, at the age of 88.  At first I thought I should write a retrospective of her work, which I have some perspective on at this point.  But everyone is doing that now, so I decided the best tribute I could make is an honest opinion about the novel I just read.  I wrote those words first; I’ve been pondering them for several days.  But I’ll precede them by a few remarks.

            I met the woman once, at a huge party for my friend and mentor, Reynolds Price.  Duke was celebrating his fifty years of teaching, and Morrison came to do an event with him, so of course she came to the party the night before.  I wanted to say hello to him before things got too far along, because he was going to be mobbed, but I waited too long and she beat me to the punch.  A friend of mine was taking care of Price at the time—he’d been crippled by spinal cancer, so he needed a succession of caretakers—and I asked what he thought I should do.  He said go ahead and say hello.  So I did, and Price graciously introduced me to Morrison.  I was afraid he thought that was why I had approached just then.  But I wanted to say hello to him.  (She was the second Nobel Prize winner I had met.  I’m accepting guesses as to who the first one was.)        

It’s an awful thing to say, but I’ve always wondered what she saw in Price.  Probably he thought of her as a peer—Price was not modest—but Reynolds Price was no peer to Toni Morrison.  I have a feeling that, as a man who grew up in the working-class South, he had an understanding of race that few of his contemporaries did.  That may have been why she was comfortable around him.  Sympathetic Southerners have a deeper understanding of race than the rest of us (I say that as a transplant, though I’ve been here for fifty years).

            He also wasn’t a misogynist.  His first mentor was Eudora Welty, and he admired women writers as much as men.  (He was something of an androgynous figure himself.)  Inasmuch as Morrison had detractors—and there weren’t many—they seemed to be men resentful of her success.  I always felt you could read misogyny between the lines.  Price would have had none of that.

            One of the questions when reading such a writer is: was she worthy of a Nobel?  I had the same question about Alice Munro when she got the award.  But there is no question in my mind about either of those women, both of whose work I’ve now read quite thoroughly.  They’re worthy and brilliant choices for the Nobel.  And I’m starting—I’m at eight out of ten novels now—to think that no one in American literature has a string of novels better than Morrison’s.  Faulkner may have written greater books.  But he punctuated them with some misfires.

            There’s also the forever mystifying question: where did a person like this come from?  Morrison knew something, or saw something, that the rest of us don’t; that’s why her work is so difficult and rewarding.  I can’t help thinking that must be a lonely situation.  You want, like anyone, to be understood, and nobody’s up to it. 

            But I never knew the woman personally, just her work.  In her work she’s in dialogue with all of us, as long as there are readers.

I assume the title is ironic.  Charles Mingus wrote a song entitled “What Love?” and introduces it in a live album.  The way he pronounces that phrase is what I would have said to Morrison after reading this novel.

People—including me—have expressed puzzlement over various of her books, but when I didn’t understand I always assumed this magisterial author knew something I didn’t.  This is the first of her novels where I don’t understand why she wrote it.  I’m not sure what she was getting at.

Love is a roughly contemporary story; it takes place in the twentieth century and comes close to the present day.  It centers on an African American hotel owner—and the son of a wealthy man—named Bill Cosey, but in the present time of the novel he has died, and the story focuses on the women left in his wake.  One is May, the widow of Cosey’s beloved son Billy Boy, who died an unfortunate early death.

May has one daughter, Christine, whose childhood best friend was named Heed.  Heed became Cosey’s second wife.  In the present time of the novel, those two women are battling fiercely over Cosey’s legacy, including the hotel, because the man didn’t leave a will (a fact which I find mildly unbelievable).  Christine has hired a young sexually attractive woman named Junior to help her with various things, including a memoir, but the real aim may be concocting a fake will.  Some ambiguous scrawls on a hotel menu are the closest thing he left to a last will and testament.  So in the present moment it’s Christine vs. Heed, with Junior on Heed’s side.  Looming over these women as a wise presence—and the former chef at the hotel—is a woman named L, who sometimes narrates.  She’s identified in no other way.

If all this sounds confusing, and hard to keep track of, it’s nothing compared to what it was to piece it together as I was reading.  The novel is split up into nine parts, with titles like “Portrait,” and “Friend,” and every time I picked it up I was asking myself, now who is this woman again?  How is she related to the others?  Christine and Heed are so close in age—just one year apart—and yet one is the man’s granddaughter, the other his widow.  They’re fiercely feuding, practically not speaking.  So we’re shocked when we find out they were once best friends.  That’s how Cosey met his second wife; she was his granddaughter’s best friend.  And then we find out—though not until we’re halfway through the book—that he made a sexual gesture toward her, and actually married her, when she was eleven years old.

This is so startling a fact—revealed so casually—that we immediately assume it’s the point of the book.  But Morrison doesn’t make that much of it; it’s just another fact of these women’s lives.  It is also a major theme of her work; it was the subject of her first novel, which concerns father-daughter incest, and shows up in other books as well.  I’m shocked at the way it is revealed in this novel, and the fact that Morrison doesn’t make more of it.  But this is really a book about the women when they were older, the women Bill Cosey left in his wake (I must also admit that, for a reader in 2019, that name is so close to Bill Cosby as to be eerie).

Other Morrison obsessions appear.  There is a fair amount about cooking in this novel; Christine is a wonderful cook, and still cooks for Heed, and L was the chef of the hotel restaurant.  She was a purist in her cooking, and her cuisine was spectacular.  There is also a lot about sex; Junior—who has had a difficult life, mostly in reformatories—latches on to a fourteen year old boy in the neighborhood named Romen, the nephew of one of Cosey’s friends.  You could call their relationship child abuse as well, but Romen’s friends are all sexually active, or at least claim to be, and Romen feels he’s died and gone to heaven.  We’re not surprised when we find out Junior has ulterior motives.  The real question is why Heed would have hired such a person in the first place.

I have to say this is the first Morrison novel where I detected weak patches.  The writing toward the end was obscure and difficult—that’s no big surprise—but I also felt it was forced and not up to her best.  The ending seemed contrived, as if she’d been interested by this situation—women fighting over a neglectful man’s legacy—but not sure how to get out of it once she’d created it.

And I have no idea what love has to do with the whole thing.  Cosey adored his son, and was shattered when he died, but I don’t find much love elsewhere.  Everyone else seems to be looking out for themselves, trying to get a piece of the action.  You can’t blame them for that.  You can wonder what the author meant by the title.