Book Reports from an English Major, Issue the Second

Yes, dear MLD readers, LydonWrites returns, now that the semester is over. I bring you the second installment of Book Reports from an English Major, with more to be shortly forthcoming.

I will review a trio of books by award winning author Toni Morrison. My professor in the Contemporary American Fiction class I was taking decided we’d read the novels Beloved, Jazz and Paradise back to back to back. If this sounds torturous, it was. You’d like to know why he did it? Turns out he’s a leading authority on Toni Morrison here in the US, and he’s been writing books about her. Oh, and apparently… these three books form a loose trilogy. Without further ado, however, on with the show.

This movie made Oprah Winfrey a star

Written in 1987, Beloved is the story of an ex-slave named Sethe, and her life in, and before, the outskirts of Cincinnati, OH. You might remember the film starring some unknowns named Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey.  Pssh. Read this instead. It’s a ghost story. It’s a story about dealing with slavery and its aftermath. It’s a complicated love story. It may also be a story about the spirit of a people who have found a way not to be broken by inhuman events and institutions. Filtered, of course, through the lens of the women in Sethe’s life. Written with the device of progression of effect, where a story’s central event is moved toward outside of the linear progression of time, things are only hinted at initially, then more and more layers are revealed of everyone’s past. What still haunts by the end of this book is whether Beloved really is the child come back to Sethe, or an escaped, kidnapped girl. What does it all mean? Read it to find out.

Funny, but I didn't hear any music at all while reading this...

Jazz, written a few years later in 1992, features the married couple, Violet and Joe Trace, and their lives in Harlem in the 1920s. I won’t ruin the central event of this novel for you by saying Joe shoots and kills a girl with whom he’s been stepping out on Violet. Why is this not ruining it? Morrison tells us the entire plot in the first 2 pages of the book. The book is really about the past of the two main characters, their feelings on love and duty, and being transplanted to The City during The Harlem Renaissance. Oh… and that notion of being a trilogy? The character of Beloved from the first book? She may or may not be the character referred to as Wild in this book. She may or may not be the mother of Joe Trace. Am I being coy? Perhaps. You want answers? Read these two books. Your inner feminine soul will thank you.

This must be just like livin' in Paradise...

This last book in the trilogy… was honestly not very good. A cast somewhat literally of thousands, there are far too many characters to accurately keep track of to retain much of a semblance of meaning. Lemme break it down for you: a group of African Americans who have been displaced by electoral upsets in Louisiana long before the action of the novel begins move west, and are summarily dismissed from every place they turn to for refuge, white and black communities both. They finally set up in Oklahoma and call the town Ruby, where the founding men run the place, and the women, by and large, “know their place”. There is a disused Convent that attracts women over the period of many years, who do NOT “know their place”, which upsets the delicate, male-dominated atmosphere. This book is ALSO written in progression of effect, with the novel opening with the men of the town of Ruby shooting and killing the women of the Convent.

Or do they?

Don’t waste your time with this one. The women don’t end up dead but somehow miraculously set on the path of walking the earth like Kane, the town is sort of changed by all the events, and might be some lessons about women being different, damaged, emotional, supernatural, vulnerable and powerful all at the same time.

Results: Beloved--> liked; Jazz–>ambivalent; Paradise–>disliked

Recommended if you like Toni Morrison and being beaten over the head with thematic issues of guilt, responsibility and the imbalanced interaction between men and women in American society.

Coming soon: Book Reports, Issue the Third, in which I tackle Patrick McCabe‘s The Butcher Boy! Also on the horizon: Roddy Doyle‘s Woman Who Walked Into Doors and A Star Called Henry