Closing the Book

Home a novel by Toni Morrison.  Vintage.  145 pp. $14.95 ***

God Help the Child a novel by Toni Morrison.  Vintage.  178 pp.  $14.95 ***

Last April, having seen Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, I resolved to read all of her novels, in order of composition.  It’s taken a while, but I finally finished with these two short novels, first published when she was 81 and 84 years old.  And if I say that these were the only real disappointments, that’s because her work as a whole is so magnificent.

I’m not sure any American writer has a stretch of five novels better than those that begin with Song of Solomon and end with Paradise; it wouldn’t take much persuading for me to extend that to nine novels, beginning with The Bluest Eye, and running to A Mercy.  I found much of her work puzzling, right down to A Mercy, which I admitted to not especially understanding, but felt it could only have been written by Morrison.  I wouldn’t say the same thing about Home.

Home is the story of an African American veteran returning from the Korean War, having lost the two best friends of his youth, full of rage at what he saw and what happened to him, almost certainly suffering from PTSD, determined to find his troubled younger sister and take care of her.  There are some odd plot twists—his sister has fallen under the influence of an unscrupulous doctor who is practicing eugenics—but it’s a story that has been told many times, and for the first time in my reading of Morrison I felt the book wasn’t distinctively hers.  Another author might have written it.

Reviewing the book for the New York Times (and apparently disagreeing with what I just said), Michiko Kakutani said, “Ms. Morrison has found a new, angular voice and straight-ahead storytelling style,” and though I have no idea what an angular voice is, the straight-ahead storytelling style is part of the problem.  Though readers complained for years that her novels were too difficult[1], and part of the difficulty had to do with the way she used language, I nevertheless think that was a major part of her greatness.  Because you struggled with her work, she took you to a new level of meaning.  And though Home is perfectly well-written, it isn’t composed in the rich language we’re accustomed to from Morrison.  It reads like a draft, which in earlier years she might have enriched with revision.

God Help the Child suffers from some of the same problems but is far stranger.  This is—as the jacket copy proclaims—“the first book by Morrison to be set in our current moment”—and the current moment was 2012.  The protagonist, an African American woman who calls herself Bride, is a highly successful designer at a cosmetics firm, and the dialogue between her and her best friend Brooklyn is so hip and of the moment that it set me teeth on edge.  These aren’t the people that have interested Morrison in the past:

“Annoyed by the chef’s efforts to make a bland fish thrilling, I scrape everything from the fillet and blurt out, ‘I want a vacation, to go somewhere.  On a cruise ship.’

“Brooklyn grins.  ‘Oooh.  Where?  Finally, some good news.’

“‘But no kids,’ I say.

“‘That’s easy.  Fiji, maybe?’

“’And no parties.  I want to be with settled people with paunches.  And play shuffleboard on a deck.  Bingo too.’

“’Bride, you’re scaring me.’  She dabs the napkin to a corner of her mouth and widens her eyes.

“I put down my fork.  ‘No, really.  Just quiet.  Nothing louder than waves lapping or ice melting in crystal glasses.’”

Morrison returns in this novel to two themes that have haunted her previous work, colorism in the African American community and the sexual abuse of children.  Bride herself, though she’s a stunning woman who has taken to wearing only white as a fashion statement, is “so black she scared me,” as her mother once put it.  “Midnight black, Sudanese black.  I’m light-skinned, with good hair, what we call high yellow, and so is [Bride’s] father.”

This mother was abusive and hateful to Bride all her life, and though she claims she was just toughening her up—worried that she’d face prejudice because of her skin color—one wonders.  The only time she really loved her daughter, the first time she took her by the hand, was when Bride pointed the finger at some teachers engaged in child molesting, and sent them to prison for 25 years.

Thus Morrison announces the two major themes of her novel, early in the book.  The other plot twist is that the only man Bride ever really cared for has just left her.  She spends the novel puzzling that out, and eventually the novel’s disparate themes come together.

I found much of the book embarrassing to read.  The characters are too hip and rich for me (there were similar characters in Tar Baby, but that was a brilliant, fascinating novel), and there are major plot details that seem melodramatic and unbelievable.  Bride eventually rediscovers her great love (their reunion is yet another scene I don’t believe), and it turns out he’s been composing prose gems about their relationship:

“You accepted like a beast of burden the whip of a stranger’s curse and the mindless menace it holds along with the scar it leaves as a definition you spend your life refuting although that hateful word is only a slim line drawn on a shore and quickly dissolved in a seaworld any moment when an equally mindless wave fondles it like the accidental touch of a finger on a clarinet stop that the musician converts into silence in order to let the true note ring out loud.”

When she read that sentence, she should have been glad the guy broke up with her.  She should have jumped for joy.

It seems unfair and fruitless to complain about late work when the earlier work is so marvelous.  If Morrison was writing too quickly in her eighties, there are plenty of reasons for that.  I point it out just to say: don’t start here!  Start with the great work, however difficult it is.  It will pay off every effort you make.

[1] There was apparently one occasion where a woman made that complaint about Paradise on Oprah’s show, and Morrison apparently put her in her place, but though I think that’s a great book—again, some prominent critics disagree with me—I can understand someone being frustrated by it.