→ January 9, 2011
→ By

A Mercy.

Toni Morrison’s most recent novel, A Mercy, is extremely short, somewhere between novel and novella, and feels as wispy as a short story with both scant character development and a frenetic jumping backward and forward in time and across multiple narrators. And Morrison’s use of an apparently invented English dialect made a slow book even harder to read, leading me to the unfortunate conclusion that, as much as I loved her books Beloved and Song of Solomon (both among my 101 favorite novels), she hasn’t produced another novel that I truly enjoyed.

A Mercy is primarily about the young Angolan slave Florens, whose mother effectively gives her up to save her from potential abuse at the hands of her current owner, only to have Florens find new trouble with her next owner, the farmer and eventual trader Jacob Vaark, when she meets the unnamed free black blacksmith and falls into a torrid affair with him. She finds herself scorned by the main slave on the property, Lina, herself once used and rejected by a man; ignored by the distant, space-cadet slave named Sorrow, herself pregnant ny an unknown father; and loved then rebuffed by Jacob’s wife (and, early in the book, widow) Rebekka, who survives a bout of smallpox only to become cold and robotic after adopting the views of a Calvinist sect.

When Morrison is good, she’s superb, with long sagas that illuminate African-American history through broad metaphors and heavy use of symbolism, right down to peculiar character names like the legendary Milkman Dead of Song of Solomon. Those metaphors take time to develop over the course of many chapters and episodes, but A Mercy is so brief – when you fold up all of the narratives, very little time passes in the book – that there’s virtually no development of metaphor or character, with the only significant change affecting Rebekkah, who moves from one extreme (compassionate, freethinking, mostly independent-minded housewife-farmer) to another after losing her husband and nearly losing her own life.

White folk generally don’t come off well in Morrison’s books – when slavery is a recurrent theme, it’s hard to paint us Caucasians as anything but the enemy – but in A Mercy, the primary villain is not white skin but the Y chromosome. Man is faithless and violent and a serial user, using the various women in the book for sex and labor and little else. There is no love between man and woman in this book; the only love is that of a mother for her child, and even that goes awry more often than not. I have no inherent objection to a book with the theme of the oppression of women by men throughout the history of civilization, but to a book that attempts to tell that story without giving me a male character who exists in as many as two dimensions.

Morrison’s two magnum opi – Beloved is $9 at that amazon link above, and I doubt you could find a better novel for under $10 new right now – are among the towering achievements not just in women’s literature or African-American literature, but in literature, period, the sort of complex, emotional works that speak to multiple fundamental aspects of our existence with poetic prose, layered meanings, and narrative greed. Jazz and Sula hinted at that greatness, but in general I’ve found the rest of Morrison’s bibliography to fall sadly short. Perhaps those two great works were all that Morrison had in her. It’s more than most authors could produce in a lifetime.

Next up: So I’m a bit behind here – just tore through Kazuo Ishiguro’s marvelous debut novel A Pale View of Hills inside of 24 hours, and am already knee-deep in Benjamin Wallace’s nonfiction thriller The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine.

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→ October 18, 2010
→ By

Tar Baby.

I’ve filed two pieces from the AFL so far, one on Sunday and one on Thursday. Jason Grey also wrote a piece on Friday; we saw Brothers pitch again on Saturday and his stuff was down about 2 miles an hour.

—

You can’t spoil a child. Love and good food never spoiled nobody.

In his New York Times review of Toni Morrison’s 1981 novel Tar Baby, John Irving referred to it as “her most ambitious book” to that point. If true, I think Morrison missed the mark for which she was aiming, but I also think Irving’s comment sells short her previous novel, Song of Solomon, which put her on the literary map after her first two novels found little commercial success.

Morrison’s two best novels – Song of Solomon and 1987’s masterwork Beloved – deal with enormous themes of African-American history and culture, replete with symbolism that took compelling stories with magical realism and elevated them to magnum opi that explored the black experience in the United States, from the present day all the way back to our shameful history of slavery. Compared to those two novels, Tar Baby is an inchoate exposition with less structure and a jumbled storyline that crystallizes around its two central characters in the final third, only to end with one of the most ambigious conclusions I’ve ever seen.

Jadine, the closest thing Tar Baby has to a central character, is a light-skinned African-American woman who was raised by her aunt and uncle on the Caribbean island of Dominique (Dominica) on the estate of the wealthy, eccentric white man Valerian Street and his beautiful but aloof wife Margaret. Jadine, now a successful model who spends much of her time in Paris and New York, finds her world turned upside down when a fugitive deckhand, a black man named Son, is found hiding in Margaret Street’s closet, an arrival that creates battle lines not between white and black but between wealth and poverty, and between old black and new black. These battle lines, more than the characters or the torrid romance that forms between Jadine and Son, define the novel.

The most interesting division forms between Son and the various black characters in the book – Jadine, her aunt Ondine and uncle Sydney, and locals on Dominique who are almost invisible not just to the Streets but even to Sydney and Ondine. (One regular helper from outside the house is often fired, but continues to come under a new name because the Streets don’t know the difference.) Son represents something atavistic to Jadine and her aunt and uncle, a throwback to the time of overt social and economic repression; Sydney and Ondine refer to him as a “swamp n—–r,” ostensibly a comment on his initial appearance in Margaret’s closet, but more likely a reflection of their own discomfort at seeing their own racial past incarnate before their eyes. Jadine finds herself attracted to Son and drawn into an affair with him that spans from Dominique to New York, where Son finds himself alienated and disgusted by the way African-Americans live with and yet unequal to whites, to Son’s poor hometown of Eloe, a Florida backwater where Jadine is appalled and terrified by the ambition-less, self-satisfied poverty:

You stay in that medieval slave basket if you want to. You will stay there by yourself. Don’t ask me to do it with you. I won’t. There is nothing any of us can do about the past but make our own lives better, that’s all I’ve been trying to help you do. That is the only revenge, for us to get over. Way over. But no, you want to talk about white babies; you don’t know how to forget the past and do better.

Jadine and Son’s affair begins as the marriage between Valerian and Margaret frays under the revelation of a three-decades-old secret, one shocking and yet inconsequential in the book’s larger plot, as the two white characters are mostly absent from the remainder of the book. Morrison’s characterization is normally first-rate, but the Streets are rendered in two or two and a half dimensions and stand more as props for her various black characters than as fully-realized individuals of their own.

Margaret is waiting for her son, Michael, to bring salvation or exoneration when he comes for Christmas, but he never arrives and the plot strand frays and disappears, which stands in for the main problem with Tar Baby as a novel: Nothing is resolved at the end of the book, and what conclusion Morrison does offer us is ambiguous at best.

By and large, Morrison doesn’t take sides in the Jadine/Son conflict; if anything she seems to offer criticisms of both the complete rejection of the past and of the willingness to repeat it. That said, Jadine’s love of a sealskin coat read to me like a condemnation of her embrace of materialism. She’s rejecting her own skin and replacing it with something natural yet artificial and inhuman, and the manufacture of such a coat through violence against nature ties into the conflict between modernity and nature, another of the themes Morrison explores in the book.

If you haven’t read any Toni Morrison, Tar Baby, isn’t the place to start; I’d send you to Beloved (one of the ten best novels I’ve ever read), then Song of Solomon, and then either Tar Baby or Jazz. Those first two novels are must reads for anyone interested in American literature, but Tar Baby doesn’t measure up to them in scope or story.

Next up: Robert Olen Butler’s short story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

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→ February 29, 2008
→ By

Song of Solomon.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is one of my favorite novels of any time period or genre, and since Song of Solomon is considered her second-best work, it’s been on my to-be-read list for a long time. It’s not quite the masterwork that Beloved is, but it’s still a great literary achievement of phenomenal scope, another example of how Morrison can take universal themes and express them through individual characters and simple stories.

Song of Solomon is the story of the Dead family, a black family separated by disagreement, by location, and by financial situation into two branches. The book’s central character, Macon “Milkman” Dead, is born in the opening pages, and the central plot strand follows his lifelong search for identity, although it’s not until the book’s final third that he realizes himself that that’s what he’s seeking. Along the way, he breaks with his father and forges a relationship with his paternal aunt, then reunites with his father and sets off on an ill-fated mission that harkens back to the origins of the family split. The novel uses this quest by the grandson of a freed slave to explore questions of racial identity, the double oppression faced by black women, and the uplifting and destructive powers of love.

The book is rife with references to the Bible and Greek mythology, including the unusual character names that are par for the course with Morrison, all bringing us insight into the characters themselves. Milkman has a sister named First Corinthians, named by her father by the random selection of a Bible verse, but named by Morrison to signify the woman’s role as someone who attempts to bring people together. (The apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians was occasioned by reports of possible schisms in the fledgling Christian church in Corinth.) Morrison also works in allusions to other stories and novels, some obvious, such as the way the character Circe serves a similar purpose to her Greek namesake, and some more debatable, such as the resemblance of Hagar, named after Abraham’s servant and concubine, to Nately’s whore from Catch-22. The heavy yet seamless use of allusions and references make reading a good Morrison novel into a textural experience.

Next up: The Pickwick Papers, by my high school nemesis, Chuckie Dickie. I’ve got 600 pages to go, so it might be a while before my next book writeup.

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