Toni Morrison’s Beloved
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
Next up: The Pickwick Papers
I agree with everything you said; it wasn’t Beloved, but I found it to be an excellent experience. Morrison showed great versatility, too, to be able to build such a great story around a male protagonist, something unique to the books of hers that I’ve read.
Keith, have you read Faulkner’s Light in August? I just got through it, and it was a surprisingly good read. Faulkner does a remarkable job in capturing the mood and mindset of that was typical in the early 20th-century American South. He develops the plot well, and the story’s ending is gut-wrenching and unexpected yet ironically suitable, if that makes any sense.
Aaron – that’s the one of Faulkner’s big four novels that I haven’t read yet, but I’m a huge Faulkner fan, so I’ll get to it at some point.
Yeah, I loved it. We read Sula for an English class and I couldn’t really get into it, but later we read Song of Solomon and it totally amazed me. I actually just started reading Beloved.
I love Song of Solomon and I think Toni is brilliant. I also love that she knows and appreciates her literary history. I find it interesting that she really sees herself as continuing a great tradition of “Magic Realism” (whether you want to call it that or not) that extends from Faulkner to Marquez to her.
I really loved this book as well. I haven’t read Beloved, though maybe I should. If you like magic realism, I really liked House of the Spirits by Isabael Allende. I never finished but enjoy Salman Rushdie’s Midnights Children and Timothy Findley’s The Wars (I think that’s what its called, he’s Canadian too) was very unique in that it used a completely distorted timeline structure.