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Reviewed by:
  • Love
  • Charlie Green
Love by Toni MorrisonKnopf, 2003, 208 pp., $23.95

Toni Morrison's work has always dealt with history, and her recent novels, the loose trilogy of Beloved, Jazz and Paradise, emphasize the difficulty of rendering and understanding history—the insufficiency of language in expressing a vital realization of the past. Because her characters always confront the past, this barrier between language and understanding is the central conflict of her fiction. Her new novel, Love, continues these themes by focusing on the idea of biography, which is [End Page 182] just as nebulous as our relationship to history.

The figure all the characters obsess over, whose life and motives they struggle to comprehend, is Bill Cosey, the late owner of a beach resort hotel that faded not long after he passed away. The resort served wealthy African Americans in the mid-twentieth century and offered a haven for singers and dancers. As in much of Morrison's work, multiple plots vie for the reader's attention, but the main plot is the struggle between Christine, Cosey's granddaughter, and Heed, Cosey's widow and second wife, who is not related by blood to Christine. They were, in fact, girlhood friends, but when Cosey married the eleven-year-old Heed, the friendship split. An ambiguous phrase written on a menu, leaving everything to his "sweet Cosey child," served as Cosey's will, leaving property and money to Heed, who called him "papa." For many, but not Christine, that settled the matter. In the present of the novel, they live together in a relationship as bitter as that between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

The appearance of a confident, sexual young woman, Junior, who is going to ghost-write Heed's memoirs of the Cosey resort, along with Christine's recent visits to her lawyer, intensify the practical need to look into the past. Other characters have less practical but no less potent needs to explore their lives as they pertain to the late Cosey. We see into the past through the points of view of many characters, Christine and Heed among them. Instead of chapters, the book has section divisions with headings such as "Benefactor," "Friend" and "Lover," which both elucidate and, paradoxically, further obscure some aspect of Cosey's life. Each character's obsession with the past, lived or imagined, offers another interpretation of Cosey's actions and the emotional fallout of his enigmatic choices. As in much of Morrison's work, the line between public and private history blurs, even as we think we've established it.

Love expands the shape of Morrison's oeuvre. The novel's slight length—just over 200 pages—belies its depth, though this isn't her best novel. The prose sometimes lacks the clarity and precision we expect of her work ("a shard of panic glinted in her eyes, then died"; how can a shard die?), and a late revelation of a character's death feels like a trick. However, several scenes pack the emotional potency of her best prose, in part because of the number of characters: she draws us into the multiplicity of the characters' lives and the mystery at the heart of the novel, which goes beyond the mere fact of whom Cosey really cared for most. This is Morrison's key strength: at the same time that she draws the reader into history, she shows us the fog we see history through.

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