Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison was arguably the best American writer of her time, leaving behind an impressive set of works that pushed the boundaries when she died, at the age of 88, three summers ago. Maybe your novels have been on your “read” stack for a long time, or maybe you’re a lifelong fan who wants to revisit your favorites. Either way, writer Bernice McFadden, whose novel The Warmest December was praised by Morrison herself, can guide you through the work of this brilliant writer.
Photography: AP
The point of entry:
Toni Morrison may be best known for her 11 novels, but her short story Recitatif has received renewed attention since it was published as a stand-alone volume earlier this year.
Originally published in 1983 in Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women edited by Amiri Baraka, the 96-page story tells the story of eight-year-old girls, Twyla and Roberta, a white and a black woman.
The most brilliant thing about this story is that it is about race, but Morrison never mentions it explicitly. In fact, they never tell us which of the girls is white and which is black, we let them intuit it through their behaviors, actions, and reactions.
Recitatif is a compact introduction to his characteristic use of language and his layered lyrical narrative style.
Morrison said Recitatif was an experiment. I call it genius.
The choice of the reading club
Many of Morrison’s novels have been called difficult and dense. The truth, I think, is that critics and the reading public have labeled them as such because Morrison is a master at juggling various literary techniques at once, rarely dropping the metaphorical ball.
Sula, perhaps the least complex of Morrison’s catalog, is the perfect novel to win over anyone who has had problems with their work before. It’s a complex but extremely compelling look at two friends, Sula and Nel. Both are such intriguing and fully realized characters that it’s hard not to invest in them. And while it may be seen as an “easier” read than, say, Beloved, don’t be fooled into thinking that Sula lacks the complexity, layers, and lush language found in Morrison’s other books; choose here.
The most current
The HBO series Watchmen focused on the massacre of the 1921 Tulsa race when enraged white mobs destroyed Greenwood, a district of the city so prosperous that they called it Black Wall Street. Bombs were dropped on houses and businesses and innocent black people were shot in the streets like rabid dogs.
But decades before Watchmen, Toni Morrison wrote Paradise, the third novel in the “trilogy” that also includes Beloved and Jazz. The novel is set in the fictional city of Ruby in Oklahoma; a city that, like Greenwood, was founded by previously enslaved black people. Here, the threat to the conservative community is a group of women who have settled in a convent on the outskirts of the city.
Eager to protect their legacy and way of life, nine male leaders set out to free the city from the female threat of independent, nonconformist thinking.
Published in 1998, Paradise was Morrison’s first novel after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and it was worth the wait.
As was his custom, Morrison paid humble homage to the ancestral origins of his characters. In Paradise, it transports the reader to the founding of Ruby in 1891 and gently transports us to the current stage of 1972, thus creating a powerful, fully realized, and realistic story.
And Paradise, apart from anything else, has one of the best first lines of any Morrison novel: “First they shoot the white girl. With the rest you can take your time. “
As with Recitatif, Morrison never revealed who the white girl in history is. And that unanswered question remains the subject of heated debate: Morrison herself said that while many readers over the years offered conjecture, “only one of them was correct.”
Which deserves more attention
Set in the 1680s, when slavery was still in its infancy, A Mercy, Morrison’s ninth novel, focuses on Florens, a young, literate slave who is sold to pay a debt. Florens is crushed by her mother’s separation, and in her new life she tries again and again to fill the open and painful wound.
Although less read than Beloved, A Mercy has much in common with Morrison’s most famous book. Here again, the writer examines the complex and often mystical bonds that exist between mother and daughter. It’s a really brilliant story that should be much better known.
If you read one, it should be
In Morrison’s first novel, The Blueest Eye, Pecola Breedlove is a black girl “who wanted to rise from the pit of her darkness and see the world with blue eyes.”
This heartbreaking and disturbing story explores many things, but most of all it talks about the oppression, submission, and sexual violence perpetrated against black women.
The story unfolds in Depression-era America, but the story and themes of incest, colorism, and self-hatred would sound true in any period. The novel is a unique piece of literature because it is both timeless and relevant.
Physical and emotional horrors … Oprah Winfrey in the 1993 Beloved film adaptation. Photo: Maximum Film / Alamy
The Classic
Many have come to know Morrison’s distinctive voice and style through his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved.
In it, the protagonist Sethe escapes the bonds of slavery with her children. Sethe’s former slaveholder chases her and when she sees him going up the road to her house, she sets out to kill her children to prevent them from being enslaved again.
Only one child, Amada, succumbs to his wounds. Years later, he returns as an apparition, chasing Sethe to madness.
The novel is a metaphor and the psychic manifestation of the physical, mental and emotional horrors suffered by enslaved people.
More than one of Morrison’s books could be classified as masterpieces, but this one is famous for one reason: everyone should read it.
This Bitter Earth by Bernice McFadden is published by Vintage (£ 9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, request your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Shipping costs may apply.