One of the great themes that threads its way through Toni Morrison’s work like a haunting melody is the hold that time past exerts over time present. In larger historical terms, it is the horror of slavery and its echoing legacy that her characters struggle with. In personal terms, it is an emotional wound or loss — and the fear of suffering such pain again — that inhibits her women and men, making them wary of the very sort of love and intimacy that might heal and complete them.
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Toni Morrison at her home in Grand View-on-Hudson, N.Y.The Radical Vision of Toni MorrisonAPRIL 8, 2015
In Ms. Morrison’s slim but powerful new novel, “God Help the Child,” the two main characters (and some of the supporting cast, too) sustained terrible hurts in childhood. Bride, now a successful cosmetics czarina, was shunned by her cruel light-skinned mother, who was embarrassed by the blue-black color of her daughter’s skin. Bride’s boyfriend Booker was a happy little boy in a happy family until his beloved older brother, Adam, was murdered by a child molester, leaving a hole in Booker’s heart. Unable to forgive his family for trying to move on after Adam’s death, Booker has become “a leaver” who has abandoned his parents and his siblings and who will leave Bride as well, shattering her hard-won faith in the power of her own beauty and force of will.
This novel does not aspire to the grand sweep of history in Ms. Morrison’s dazzling 1987 masterpiece, “Beloved,” but like “Home” (2012), it attests to her ability to write intensely felt chamber pieces that inhabit a twilight world between fable and realism, and to convey the desperate yearnings of her characters for safety and love and belonging. The scars inflicted on Bride and Booker by their childhoods are metaphors of sorts for the calamities of history and the hold they can exert over a country’s or a people’s dreams.
[For more of this story, written by Michiko Kakutani, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04...ain-of-the-past.html]
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