Beloved

’ve only given myself a few hours between finishing Toni Morrison’s Beloved and writing this post, and my thoughts are still a bit jumbled about the book. I’m torn between spouting about how masterful elements of the book were, and complaining a bit about things that I thought could have been done better. Perhaps I’ll do a bit of both.

This is not the first novel of Morrison’s I’ve read. About six months ago I plowed through Song of Solomon, her third novel and one of four books to be selected by Oprah’s Book Club. It was a fantastic read. I won’t go into a full review here, but I found the detail to be rich, the language to be appropriate of the time period, and the characters to be profoundly moving. Morrison, if nothing else, is a masterful writer of emotion and of history. Song of Solomon follows the life of a young black man in the early 20th century as he struggles to learn about his heritage and find a place for himself in a world that is not altogether friendly. Sounds like an Oprah’s Book Club book, doesn’t it?

As an aside here (forgive me, I love asides) I’d like to make a note about Oprah’s Book Club because there are so many out there who love to hate it. The truth is, not only has Oprah’s Book Club prompted an unprecedented number of people to read books that they otherwise wouldn’t have bothered with, but she also has an uncanny knack for picking some truly wonderful novels and writers. Sure, there are a fair number of books on her list that could be turned into fantastic Lifetime original movies, (woman is abused/diagnosed with a horrible disease/something else awful happens to her, she deals with the pain, she finally discovers how beautiful/meaningful/poignant life is despite this, the end) and even this isn’t something to scoff at, as many people love Lifetime movies and even those who don’t can acknowledge that these stories can be beautiful and moving. There are many of us who read avidly that are tired of this same story, but even for us, Oprah has some fantastic picks, like East of Eden by John Steinbeck, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, Anna Kerenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Sound and the Fury, As I lay Dying, and Light in August by William Faulkner, Night by Elie Wiesel, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, and many others. I think people like to slam Oprah because she tends to favor stories written by or about women, though, obviously, not exclusively. I don’t find that to be a problem. For too many years the literary world and the various cannons of literature that have been developed have been undeniably centered on male authors. I don’t think it’s a problem to introduce a few more women to the scene, nor do I think it’s a problem for Oprah to get millions of people reading classic authors like Faulkner and Marquez. So for those of you who like to hate on Oprah, I’d suggest reading a selection of the books she’s picked before you hate too hard.

End of aside. Wow, that was longer than planned. Back to Beloved.

One of my favorite undergraduate professors at the University of Michigan talked this book up to me and between that, and my love for Song of Solomon, I was excited for Beloved. I was not immediately hooked upon starting the novel, though I did immediately enjoy the deliciousness of Morrison’s writing. She has an odd and interesting way of describing things. She never states anything outright, like what someone’s age, weight, and eye color is, but she has a way of describing characters and places—what grows there, how the air moves, what the characters like to do, what their thoughts are, what kinds of sounds they make to themselves when no one is around—that makes me feel like I am intimately acquainted with them. Morrison set herself up for a difficult task in this novel, as her characters are ex-slaves who have been freed or have run away to Ohio where they attempt to remake their lives as free people, though dealing with difficult and sometimes traumatic issues and events seems to be Morrison’s strong suit. Morrison is clearly attempting to say some very profound things about this time period and the lives of those who suffered as slaves. She does this fantastically, I think. She does not stick to telling us that their lives were difficult. She describes the taste and feel of the way a horse-bit feels when tied into a human mouth. She describes the horrible feeling of running, not knowing if your family is behind you, in front of you, or has been discovered by hostile whites. She describes the startling, frustrating line between the world of whites and blacks during this time period so well that it feels real, tangible. All of Morrison’s strengths—description, creating beautiful characters, expert use of black colloquial language, and evoking emotion in the reader—shine through in this novel.

“She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.” (88)

Yet I could not help but be bothered by some of the simple literary devices that she used to power the flow of the novel. The truth is, not much actually happens in the present time of the story. There’s more action than there is in a novel like, say, To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, but there still is very little happening. Most of the action of the novel occurs in flashbacks. Morrison relies heavily on foreshadowing and hint-dropping to drive the interest of the story, which is frustrating because often when the full truth comes to light of whatever it was that was hinted at or foreshadowed about, it turns out that it was something that could have easily been described earlier, as if the only purpose of hiding this information was to keep the reader reading. Finally, I found that the use of spirits and ghosts in the story almost detracted from it more than added to it. It felt, in some ways, like Morrison was attempting to put a bit of magic realism into her novel, yet her use of it was not as satisfying as I have experienced in other novels. Typically, novels with magic realism in them have magic working throughout the whole world of the story. Morrison reigns the magic in to focus on a specific house, and in so doing the magic feels more like the magic one finds in scary movies than the magic that one would find in, say, One Hundred Years of Solitude. It just doesn’t feel real at times. In this novel she uses ghosts and spirits in the place of a moving plot, which can leave the novel feeling stagnant.

However, this is not to say that I did not find the novel to be an enjoyable read. For those of you interested in delving into the world of Morrison, which I would recommend for an avid reader, I would say that starting with Song of Solomon is a better choice than starting with Beloved. As for Beloved, I think in many ways it tells a story that needs to be told. It serves as a reminder, in some ways, of what life can be like when chaotic things like slavery are allowed to take place. I cannot argue with the novel winning a Pulitzer Price for Fiction (1988), it is well deserved. The novel has also been made into a movie staring none other than Oprah Winfrey, which I have not seen, but would be interested to hear reactions to it from those of you who have seen it. Overall, I’d give this novel a seven out of ten.