Word: conventional
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...Ritz Hotel--was a plush ending that probably would not have been predicted for Chanel by the nuns in the Aubazine orphanage, where she spent time as a ward of the state after her mother died and her father ran off. No doubt the sisters at the convent in Moulins, who took her in when she was 17, raised their eyebrows when the young woman left the seamstress job they had helped her get to try for a career as a cabaret singer. This stint as a performer--she was apparently charming but no Piaf--led her to take...
...chapter describes the intrusion by the men of Ruby, Oklahoma--"the one all-black town worth the pain"--into a nearby former mission-school known colloquially as the Convent. Five women, fugitives each from justice, abuse or a lover's caprice, are living in the Convent at the moment when the men invade one morning and shoot them...
...They shot the white girl first...." Morrison narrated her story, which began deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, where men from the small town of Ruby--in defense of the "one all-black town worth the pain"--assault the nearby town of Convent and the women...
...they come to pin the blame for this disruption on the strange women in the Convent is a tale of Faulknerian complexity and power. Morrison once wrote a Cornell master's thesis on Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, and the Mississippian's incantatory prose rhythms still crop up in her writing. Here is Deacon musing on the past as he drives around in Ruby: "He [Deacon's grandfather] would have been embarrassed by grandsons who worked twelve hours five days a week instead of the eighteen-to-twenty-hour days Haven people once needed just to keep alive, and who could...
...there is the subject of race. It is not mentioned a great deal in Paradise, perhaps because nearly all the characters are black. It is almost impossible to identify the white woman whose shooting is announced in the novel's opening sentence. As the women drift, singly, into the Convent, the reader--knowing what lies in store for the white one--must wonder: Is it Mavis? Grace? Seneca? Pallas...