Review: Beloved, by Toni Morrison

[Fuck it, I edited the post. Does that bother anyone? I can revert to the clumsier original if it does. I am upset by a comment obviously, but it was a fair one in the sense that an anecdote and a bunch of adjectives on my part are not sufficient to communicate my understanding of the novel. And I'm looking at it this way too: some sophomore is going to find this post sooner or later, and for the purposes of my self-respect, I'd like that turned-in copy to at least look like it was plagiarized.]


It's not like the shitty old cliché needs any more mileage, but the cover of a book really does offer a small basis for pre-judgment, at least in the sense that it tells me what the publisher thinks of this book, or what hints to content the company thinks will entice people to buy it. Books convey all kinds of suggestions like this. For a sufficiently famous or worthy work, you'll find a few pages packed with one-sentence blurbs, which are probably better thought of as recommendations from famous authors you "know" rather than reviews. (I like to write out my mental blather, but I'm not usually comfortable to go and tell people to read stuff--friends' recommendations are probably the biggest shapers of expectations for this sort of thing.) So with Beloved, I picked up the shiny red trade paperback, with the metallized cursive, which looks like it's meant to be somebody's "book of gold," deeply meaningful and touching. And of course, there's the Nobel prize. What Beloved is, however, is a ghost story, a haunting that's used as a vehicle to carry the unspeakable past into the present. Now, I often like a good haunting, especially when it's plotted with sensitivity to the deceased, and Beloved is, on one level, that sort of book, although it took me a few chapters to realize that, and I wasn't clear whether it was the marketing that governed my expectations. Anticipating one of the best novels of the twentieth century, I felt a bit let down to find just a great-in-parts one. Did the publishers affect me more than they usually do? Irritating if true.

I feel like such a Philistine, especially considering it's little things I kept bumping up against. I stumbled over missed metaphors (this annoyed me most--for example, when the hell is a cloudy sky white hot?) and I had a difficult time pinpointing the authorial voice, which drifted from dialect to a sort of generic third-person academic tone, and sporadically included repeated descriptors as you'd find in oral traditions (Baby Suggs, holy...), to streams of consciousness. I don't have any problem with any of the narrative styles on their own, I just wasn't sure they synthesized into a neat voice. As I mentioned, this novel is a ghost story, but even though we're introduced to the spirit on the first page, the tension is not the mystery of its origins, or rather, it's not the raw fact of them. It's not until the Beloved character returns a couple chapters later, fey and needy, that I began to worry what's going to happen to the living as much as what happened to them. Then, the novel got going for me.

[One issue may be just how much Beloved reminded me of Octavia Butler's novel, Kindred, published in the seventies. It would make a good paired reading. Both use a fantasy trick to bring the modern reader to face the troubling psychological depth of the slave past. I remember Butler's as the better novel, but it's been at least ten years since I read it, so who knows. And it may be that Butler was a science fiction writer, and I was anticipating such a mechanism. There's also a case to be made that it's an easier entry point for cracker douchebags like myself.]

What Morrison has done very well, however, is to get into the heads of her characters and bring the dehumanizing face of slavery to an intimate light. [Quoting myself a little now...] The human cost, physical and emotional, of slavery came through loud and clear in the novel. The way it broke up the most sacred and basic bonds that people cherish was wrenching to read. And it answered the question it set out to answer: how could a mother who loves her children kill them? You leave the book thinking, what choice did she have? I admit that the degrees and depth of the mothering instinct was less intuitive to me than a man's struggle for self-possession (I think Morrison did a hell of a job with the male characters) or a living daughter's inward retreat, but it couldn't be missed.

And to the author's credit, I think it's a very difficult place to transport the contemporary reader, especially one of the aforementioned cracker douchebag variety. The backstory is based on the then-famous trial of Margaret Garner, who, like the protagonist Sethe, allegedly killed her children to prevent them from being dragged back into that life. As the characters look back, Morrison shows us lynching and murder, as well as some abuses that were more probably inventive than the story needed (although clearly written as an attack on Sethe's very motherhood), as well as some masters that were improbably decent. (The author doesn't come as far as forgiveness for a damn one of them.) I thought the everyday mistreatment was more compelling than the elaborately staged events, the cases where people were respected or treated about as well as valued livestock, not hated by whitey, but as people, beneath even his notice.

Part of the evocative success comes, I think, from meeting Sethe, Baby, and Paul D when they are no longer slaves, living what would almost be a happy domestic life, were it not for the angry scars and ghosts (real and figurative) intruding unwillingly from the disturbing past. The characters, up till the time Paul D walks into Sethe's home, have been living numbly, loving guardedly, suffering the expectation that another tragedy is ready to explode around the corner. Even if it was a better life, freedom in postwar Cincinnati meant demeaning jobs, no protection of (or from) the law, and a hobbled human network, which in Sethe's case had further abandoned her. By novel's end, it's clear that the grudgingly restored human connections will take generations for healing.