Black madonna: Toni Morrison's popularity is less a matter of literary taste than of mass psychology

National Review, Feb 9, 1998 by David Klinghoffer

THE other day on a street near NR's offices I passed a deranged man who was shouting to himself. "Spanish mackerel?" he demanded. "I didn't even know there was such a thing as Spanish mackerel!" Then he was gone, and I never learned what had got him onto the subject of that particular fish or what he found so astonishing about it.

Listening to people like that, and hopelessly trying to guess what they're talking about, is not unlike the experience of plowing through Toni Morrison's new novel.

Yes, that's the same Toni Morrison whose beatific Black Madonna face shines down from the cover of the current Time magazine, where she is heralded as "America's Greatest Storyteller." It's the same Toni Morrison who has lately been calling forth, from critics and feature reporters, geysers of foaming prose even worse than her own. My favorite tribute is John Leonard's in The Nation: "So abundant, even prodigal, is Toni Morrison's first new novel since her Nobel Prize, so symphonic, light-struck, and sheer, as if each page had been rubbed transparent . . . that I realize I've been holding my breath since December 1993. After such levitation, weren't all of us in for a fall? Who knew she'd use the prize as a kite instead of a wheelbarrow?" Those sentences had, from the sound of them, been in Mr. Leonard's mouth ever since he started holding his breath four years ago.

Mrs. Morrison is regarded as a national oracle. The Washington Post says she gets "more requests to lecture, to read, to be interviewed, to participate in panels and attend conferences, to receive honorary degrees and serve on government commissions, than could be dealt with by a whole shelf of writers." 60 Minutes devoted a segment to her, and her novel Beloved will be released as a movie this fall, produced by Oprah Winfrey, who says she carried the book around "like it was the Bible" during filming. In feature articles she is invariably described as "majestic" or "regal," a recognition of her status as the Queen of American Letters.

The novel at the center of this latest round of critical breathholding and levitating is called Paradise. It takes place in a fictional all-black township, Ruby, Oklahoma, where the residents are both proud and beautiful, as the author repeatedly tells us: "blue-black people, tall and graceful," "all of them were handsome, some exceptionally so," "these outrageously beautiful, flawed, and proud people." The beauty and the pride, however, are disrupted by the action taken by several of the town fathers against a group of women squatting in an old mansion nearby. They storm the place one morning with the intention of shooting everybody inside. As the novel begins these local patriarchs have just arrived, and at the end they start shooting. In between, we have a series of flashbacks on how the women got there in the first place.

Lunatics and senile people will introduce names and references to events into their conversations without wondering whether their interlocutor is familiar with any of them. Though Toni Morrison is no lunatic, nor at 66 years old has she gone senile, she often writes that way.

One of her favorite techniques is to launch into a description of an event as if the reader already knew the dramatis personae, what actually happened, and what precipitated it. For instance: "So she [Seneca, one of the women in the mansion] had done her best to please, even if the Bible turned out to be heavier than the shoes. Like all first offenders, he wanted both right away. Seneca had no trouble with the size-11 Adidas, but Preston, Indiana, didn't sport bookstores, religious or regular." This is the first time "he," the Bible, the shoes, or Preston, Indiana, has made an appearance in the novel.

In this instance at least Mrs. Morrison later fills us in. Elsewhere she seems to have a narrative playing in her head which she vaguely alludes to but otherwise keeps secret. She'll mention "the crazy black woman ruining the Christmas carols" or certain "voices" that "pack the rafters" in the basement of the mansion, and never tell you whom or what either refers to. Elsewhere she's just completely incomprehensible: "In that holy hollow between sighting and following through, could grace slip through?" Uh, maybe.

Some critics report that they love this opaque quality. In The New Yorker, Louis Menand declares: "One reason that these stories are so gripping is that they are hard to understand." And Toni Morrison tells interviewers that she seeks "to provide the places and spaces so that the reader can participate" -- as if clearly written novels didn't require reader "participation" -- "to have the reader work with the author in the construction of the book." In other words, we are invited to do the job her editor at Knopf chose not to do. But the experience, aesthetic or emotional, of reading a novel is not likely to benefit from the reader's being forced to edit the book as he goes along.

IT would be different if, beneath the jumble of words from "America's Greatest Storyteller," there were actually much of a story. Storytelling requires some care as to motivation, and Mrs. Morrison has claimed to be such a maniac about that element that she "wasted piles of paper" trying to come up with a plausible scenario in which O. J. Simpson could have been moved to murder his wife. As she recalls in her book Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case, when she couldn't think of single scenario that wasn't egregiously racist, she judged that he must be innocent.