Word: morrison
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...debate about where Morrison ranks among the other American laureates will probably simmer for years. Does she belong with Steinbeck and Pearl S. Buck, authors whose earnest social concerns and novels now strike most critics and readers as passe? Some reviewers have found Morrison's novels overly deterministic, her characters pawns in the service of their creator's designs. Essayist Stanley Crouch says Morrison is "immensely talented. I just think she needs a new subject matter, the world she lives in, not this world of endless black victims." But for every pan, Morrison has received a surfeit of paeans...
...Come Prepared or Not at All" appears on page 13 of Morrison's new novel, Paradise (Knopf; 318 pages; $25), her first since winning the prize. The curious and somehow ominous phrase that she stumbled across some six years ago, before her life grew exhaustingly complicated, has finally blossomed into a book published in a first printing of 400,000 copies. And Paradise was controversial even before it went on sale. Jump-the-gun reviews have ranged from the splenetic ("a clunky, leaden novel"--the New York Times) to the ecstatic ("the strangest and most original book that Morrison...
...many pleasures of Paradise, for longtime Morrison readers, is watching the ways it picks up and elaborates on subjects and themes from the author's earlier works. There are, for example, females rebelling against patriarchal mores, as in Sula (1974), and black characters judging one another on the relative darkness or lightness of their skin, as in Tar Baby (1981). Morrison conceived Paradise as the final installment of a trilogy that began with Beloved (1987). That haunting tale of a mother, an escaping slave, who loved her daughter so fiercely that she killed her rather than allowing...
...Morrison traces the genesis of this brutal act back to the 1870s, when nine African-American patriarchs, ex-slaves in Mississippi and Louisiana, joined together, gathered their wives and children, picking up a few strays in the process, and headed west to settle in the Oklahoma Territory. Eventually, arduously, they reach a town called Fairly, where their spokesmen appeal to the local citizens, blacks like them except with lighter skin, for permission to settle there. The Fairly leaders say no ("Come Prepared or Not at All"). This rejection will reverberate through the next hundred years of the outcasts' collective memory...
Paradise establishes these two locales--the place where men rule and the one where women try to escape that rule--in a manner far more complex, nuanced and ambiguous than any summary can reproduce. It is a mistake common to both Morrison's admirers and critics to understand her fiction too quickly. The violent act that begins and ends Paradise--the assault of the men of Ruby on the women in the Convent--cannot be described simply as a feminist parable, as some early reviewers have already dubbed...