House of ironies
Toni Morrison’s new fable is full of mordant wisdom, writes Morag Fraser.
Toni Morrison’s new novel is short – fable length. But fables are multi-layered, so read this one at least twice lest you find yourself nonplussed, even repulsed, by its veneer of reflexive cynicism, or lose your bearings in its mirror house of ironies. Miss its mordant wisdom.
Morrison’s dense, multi-voiced tale (five first-person narrators and an authorial gatherer) opens with a whining mother, mortified by her newborn’s colour (‘‘Tar is the closest I can think of’’) and ‘‘different’’ hair (‘‘straight but curly like those naked tribes in Australia’’). She insists that her child, named Lula Ann, call her ‘‘Sweetness’’, because ‘‘being that black and having what I think are too-thick lips calling me ‘Mama’ would confuse people’’.
‘‘High yellow’’, as she describes herself, the mother has been infected with the allusive, fearhaunted vocabulary of colour prejudice: her daughter’s eyes, she says, have ‘‘something witchy about them’’.
The daughter, Lula Ann Bridewell, sheds her ‘‘dumb countryfied name’’ as soon as she leaves high school. Amputating it to Bride, she graduates to the cosmetics industry, buys a Jaguar that complements her panther beauty, and rides a fashion wave. ‘‘Black is the new black’’, her ‘‘total person’’ designer friend Jeri tells her. He counsels Bride to wear only white. Classy. ‘‘Makes people think of whipped cream and chocolate souffle every time they see you.’’
But no character dubbed a ‘‘midnight Galatea’’ is going to be enveloped in hip glamour for long. Satire and myth are only two of the arrows in Morrison’s quiver. Piercing realism is another. As she has so often done in her long and illustrious career, Morrison sites her tale inside a moral contagion, a hypocrisy that implicates us all, leaving us anxious and chastened. Every character in God Help the Child is blighted, in one or another way, by violence or abuse.
Bride has a guilt-debt to pay to a convicted woman she once accused of child molestation. Bride’s mysterious, horn-playing boyfriend, Booker Starbern (Morrison’s names are more acidly defining and ironic than Dickens’), is so scarred by his brother Adam’s sexual violation and murder that he misinterprets Bride’s restitutionary motives and so deserts her in disgust.
Bride is savagely beaten by the woman she clumsily attempts to compensate, and, with Booker gone, has to be succoured by her streetwise, ‘‘chalk-white with blond dreadlocks’’ girlfriend, Brooklyn, whose own motives are sourly mixed. Assailed and betrayed, Bride begins to revert to prepubescent impotence – becoming again a small black victim child. Or so she believes.
Morrison rations out her revelations – of character and explanatory event – in a narrative that is accretive, but also brutal and shocking: often one reels rather than reflects on the complexity of human action and intention that the novel comprehends. But only for a moment. Morrison pulls you back with passages of such intense lyricism or psychological penetration that the world seems to make fragmented sense again, if only through the prism of her tragic understanding and elegiac gifts.
As here, when Booker remembers his murdered, beloved brother: ‘‘The last time Booker saw Adam he was skateboarding down the sidewalk in twilight, his yellow T-shirt fluorescent under the Northern Ash trees. It was early September and nothing anywhere had begun to die. Maple leaves behaved as though their green was immortal. Ash trees were still climbing toward a cloudless sky. The sun began turning aggressively alive in the process of setting. Down the sidewalk between hedges and towering trees Adam floated, a spot of gold moving down a shadowy tunnel toward the mouth of the living sun.’’
Booker, rendered in thirdperson narrative, is intellectual and troubled, with current theories about race (‘‘Scientifically there’s no such thing as race, Bride’’) on his tongue and former poet laureate and acclaimed environmentalist Robert Hass in his bag. Booker allows Morrison to expand the range and depth of her tale. You can hear the experience of the Princeton academic Morrison was for many years in Booker’s story.
He is also the contemplative foil for Bride’s less tutored determination to ‘‘understand what she was made of – cotton or steel’’. And he introduces Bride (and us) to his fabulous aunt and mentor, the self-described ‘‘Queen’’, who arrives late in the story and serves as the novel’s paradoxical fairy godmother. Or does she? You’ll have to read it and decide for yourself.