• Read a review by Stephen M.
Deusner
• Read an Excerpt
• Reading Group Guide

In the magical mélange that informs Toni Morrison's creative
talent, she transforms her stories into masterpieces. LOVE is her
first novel in five years. It follows on the heels of PARADISE, her
masterful story of free slaves, driven across the country until
they were able to settle and build their own town. All was as it
should be in their "paradise" until over time it became a painful
form of hell. Like an alchemist she takes words, ideas, events and
characters through an ingenious array of juxtapositions and
transmogrifications, which transcend their mundane use by others.
All of her work is rich in myth, metaphor, mirth, wisdom, humanity
and biblical references.

Love in its many heartfelt forms --- seductive, romantic,
obsessive, misplaced, conjugal, courtly, honorable, devotional,
intimate, affectionate, sentimental, abiding and faithful --- are
catalogued in a concatenation of elegant structure. Love in its
other forms --- unresolved, unrequited, betrayed, brokenhearted,
faithless, critical, cold, misplaced, forbidden, jealous and
degraded --- turns into hate. Love and hate emerge as mysterious
"characters" imbued by their inherent inexplicability, and this
adds depth to her newest provocative novel.

LOVE is an exploration into the deepest regions of these most
complicated of human emotions. Culture and society are rich in
examples of how mere mortals have always attempted to understand
the animal attraction between two people and, in doing so, to
rationalize the essences of passion and romance. Ancient myths,
poems, plays, novels, songs, folklore, fairy tales, film,
advertising and popular culture in general all reflect peoples'
preoccupation with love and its dizzying impact on the human
psyche; both lover and beloved are equally bewildered by its
bewitching spell. In a recent interview Morrison said, "I was
interested in the way in which sexual love and other kinds of love
lend themselves to betrayal. How do ordinary people end up ruining
the thing they most want to protect? And obviously the heart of
that is really the effort to love."

Bill Cosey, around whom the story is written, has been dead for
twenty-five years. But he is still a very real presence to the
women who shared his life. During the 1940s he became a millionaire
as the owner of Cosey's Hotel and Resort, "the best and best known
vacation spot for colored folk on the East Coast. Everybody came
… guests from as far away as Michigan and NY couldn't wait to
get down here. [The] resort was more than a playground; it was a
school and a haven where people debated death in the cities, murder
in Mississippi, and what they planned to do about it other than
grieve and stare at their children."

The women who inhabit Cosey's world are Heed, his second wife, the
girl he married when she was eleven and now is a recluse determined
to keep the family's legacy; Christine, his granddaughter, who was
Heed's best friend until she married Cosey and became an enemy;
May, Christine's mother, Cosey's daughter-in-law and widow of his
only son Billy Boy; Vida, a former employee who, while grateful to
Cosey, was never fooled by him, nor did she believe he died a
natural death; Celestial, his pleasure woman, the only one who asks
to be his equal and who was able to inspire his romantic love;
Junior, recently released from Correctional who talks herself into
a job as "assistant" to the aging Heed, who needs help with a
nefarious plan; and the "humming" voice of L, the hotel's former
cook --- her presence is quite ghostly but her words wise as she
opens and then closes the story.

At one point Celestial strides into the sea. "She's unfettered and
unencumbered," Morrison says. "I wanted that scene. She goes into
the water, she goes into the night. She's fluffing her hair. I
wanted the notion of a free female, or a licensed one, anyway."
Morrison has strived in all of her books to infuse this kind of
power, self-awareness and confidence in at least one of her major
female characters.

Both before and after the civil rights movement, African American
women were/are aware of everything they do --- mostly because their
actions are defined by a primarily white world. Of this Morrison
has said that while the movement was absolutely necessary, vital
elements of the black community were lost, which parallels the
meteoric decline of the resort from its halcyon days. As African
Americans had more money and more opportunities, they gave up the
lives they had before and that meant changes in the perception of
blacks among themselves and then slowly in the wider community.
They moved on and moved away; their institutions, hangouts and most
familiar meeting centers were abandoned. Thus, asks Morrison, was
it all good?

In one of her moving and ghostly soliloquies, L says, "It comforts
everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those
who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of
shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with
money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because,
in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a
sure sign of honesty ... Mr. Cosey didn't care. He wanted a
playground for folk who felt the way he did, who studied ways to
contradict history."

LOVE is a complicated story, the kind of multi-themed,
multi-layered, multi-generational novel Morrison is known for. In
this book she pushes readers to think about the kinds of love
people experience and how that love can be destroyed; she expounds
on the nature of change and how it can both nourish and poison. On
this Morrison opines, "To reduce it to its simplest and most common
denominator, race is at the heart of democracy … these are
not the struggles of minority groups … that's the canvas of
this book, upon which I hoped to paint these people who grew up
around [Cosey's] resort, a kind of apogee of black entrepreneurship
that could be self-contained. Everyone who could afford it went,
and those who couldn't listened or were proud of it."

Morrison won the Nobel Prize in 1993. Her contribution to the
world's literary canon is enormous and invites enrichment, spirited
discussion, scholarship and pleasure. Each of her books deals
primarily with black women and how their lives are defined by
aspects of American culture, the circumstances of their birth,
their roles with the men who are drawn to them, and --- of course
--- their color.

This reviewer has never spoken personally about a writer, but in
this case I feel compelled to share my impressions of her from the
two times I was honored to have been in her presence. When she
reads from her work the room is utterly silent and the audience
breathes as one. She is soft-spoken, gracious, charming,
down-to-earth, curious about her readers, and patiently answers
questions. On the continuum of her work, LOVE is the next logical
leap in her immutable search for the answers to the questions of
life that interest her.

So you can see why
families make the best enemies," writes Toni Morrison in her eighth
novel, LOVE. "They have time and convenience to honey-butter the
wickedness they prefer."