Even after the Pulitzer, the Nobel, and the news that Oprah Winfrey was starring in this fall’s film version of her book Beloved, Toni Morrison, the Robert F. Goheen [’40 *48] Professor in the Humanities, didn’t simply kick back to collect prizes and royalties and read her favorite P. D. James mysteries. First, she faced the big crises: Soon after she deposited her $818,000 Noble check in a rather inaccessible retirement account, her house in Grand View-on-Hudson, New York, burned down.
Then there were the petty annoyances, like students in her creative writing seminar growing about having to rewrite their stories. To top it off, her publisher wouldn’t even let her name her new novel.
Paradise hits bookstores in January, but Morrison wanted to call it War. It begins with a six-shot staccato sentence: “They kill the white girl first.” Explains Morrison, “I wanted to open with somebody’s finger on the trigger, to close when it was pulled, and to have the whole novel exist in that moment of the decision to kill or not.” Knopf feared the title War might turn off Morrison fans. “I’m still not convinced they were right,” she says.
The new book finishes a trilogy begun with her 1987 masterpiece, Beloved, the tale of a runaway slave who would rather kill her children than see them captured. It was followed by 1992’s Jazz, which imitates the musical form’s lean dissonance. Paradise completes the trilogy’s arc of inquiry into the dangers of excessive love – for children, mates, or God. It also address a question that has always intrigued Morrison: “Why paradise necessitates exclusion.”
The book is set in all-black Ruby, Oklahoma, founded by settlers who had been turned away by a town of lighter-skinned blacks. It is a community, they hope, insulated from “Out There where every cluster of whitemen looked like a posse.”
But by 1968, the outside is seeping in, with graffiti of black-power fists and murmurings of illicit abortions. Soon, town residents pinpoint scapegoats for all their ills: five magic-practicing women living in a former convent. These women are not “color coded,” as Morrison puts it, and the reader has no way of knowing their race. It is a bold literary device: In struggling to figure out which of the women is white, the reader is forced to ask why that detail even matters.
Initial reviews for Paradise have been less than stellar. While praising the book’s lush lyricism, critics have noted heavy-handed foreshadowing and contrived plot devices. In retrospect, Morrison wishes she had had more time to “take a step back” between the time she finished the manuscript and the publication date, which was moved up from the spring to cash in on the heavy postholiday bookstore traffic.
But casual readers may struggle with Morrison’s writing, which often combines the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Márquez with the convoluted plotting of William Faulkner. Even Song of Solomon, arguably her most straightforward novel, was deemed too hard by many when Oprah Winfrey tapped it for her book club. Morrison is sympathetic, to a point. “People’s anticipation now more than ever for linear, chronological stories is intense because that’s the way narrative is revealed in TV and movies,” she says. “But we experience life as the present moment, the anticipation of the future, and a lot of slices of the past.”
Though Morrison worries about the accessibility of her prose, she has been pleasantly surprised while scanning Internet chat rooms devoted to her work. “The sort of lively, intelligent conversations going on there are something,” she says. “They are articulate about what they loathe.”
But in her 66 years, the sharecropper’s granddaughter from Lorain, Ohio, has acquired the stature to absorb most criticism. “I’ve stopped dreaming about kneecapping,” she jokes. In fact, she would rather have people grapple with her work than merely revere it. “I have people tell me, ‘Your novel is on my bed stand.’ I don’t want books to be what people dip into before they go to sleep.”
This was adopted from an article in the January 19 U.S. News & World Report. © 1998.
This was originally published in the March 11, 1998 issue of PAW.