Toni Morrison is required reading in just about every high school and college curriculum for a reason. This Pulitzer Prize-winning woman can write like no other.
With prose as dense as poetry and characters as real as they are fictional, Morrison's eighth novel, Love, further propagates the generally-accepted conviction that Morrison is one of our time's greatest authors.
Love, in established Morrison style, is a non-sequential character study brimming with hatred, passion, phantoms of long ago betrayals and both feminist and racial commentary. Love sets itself up as a book about a man, the affluent and charismatic Bill Cosey, and his clan of wretched, clawing Cosey women, but it is truly the story of the relationships between these complicated women whose lives happen to intertwine with Cosey's.
Set in a rundown Atlantic coastal town, Love revolves around Heed the Night Johnson, Cosey's child bride, and Christine, Cosey's granddaughter: the two women whose sour greed and venomous rivalry is deemed as responsible for the shaming of the Cosey name as well as the collapse of his life work -- a resort catering to wealthy African Americans looking for a classy, boozy escape during segregation times.
Heed and Christine live in rancor in the old Cosey house, haunted by their unraveled childhood friendship and constantly plotting one another's demise. When Cosey died, his "will," a note scrawled on a 1965 hotel menu, left everything to the "sweet Cosey girl." The deliberation on who that girl is or was serves as a central theme. Was it Heed, who honeymooned at 11 years old? Christine, whose best friend morphed into her grandmother? Or perhaps it was Celestial, the mysterious "sporting woman" with a scar running across her beautiful cheek?
While most of Love is set in that single resort town and its once plantation-land outskirts, the story jumps from past to present and back again, sometimes within a matter of sentences and usually without any warning or transition. Don't try to keep your feet grounded while reading Love. Don't try to find your way. It may be a slim novel, but its 200 pages are thorny.
Morrison wants her readers lost, wandering around her characters' memories and schemes until she's ready to reveal the full extent of these relationships and the partial truths to their lies. Characters, events and places are often mentioned chapters before they're explained. Some, in fact, remain unexplained.
What's remarkable about Morrison is her aptitude at shying away from the obvious. She never tells readers which characters to like or even which to believe, and she never stoops to defining her themes or even answering the questions her narrative raises.
This lack of total resolution, however, does not discredit Love, but bolsters its intricate aura and unveils just enough of each secret that readers will crave another study of the book's convoluted but telling text, a text that explores how love can save or destroy us all.
