Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

As Milkman watched the children, he began to feel uncomfortable.  Hating his parents, his sisters, seemed silly now.  And the skim of shame that he had rinsed away in the bathwater after having stolen from Pilate returned.  But now it was as thick and tight as a caul.  How could he have broken into that house--the only one he knew that achieved comfort without one article of comfort in it.  No soft worn-down chair, not a cushion or a pillow.  No light switch, no water running free and clear after a turn of a tap handle.  No napkins, no tablecloth.  No fluted plates or flowered cups, no circle of blue flame burning in a stove eye.  But peace was there, energy, singing, and now his own remembrances.


Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon opens with this very crytpic sentence: "The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o'clock."  To the story, the agent is nobody, a non-character, but his attempted flight--you can guess how it turns out--provides the guiding symbol for the rest of the novel: a man, alone, making a leap that, no matter how it ends, will take him away from his town, his home, and his family.  There are other flights in the novel, too: The protagonist, Milkman Dead, learns that his great-grandfather was reputed to be part of a legendary tribe of "flying" slaves in the antebellum South; at the end, Milkman too leaps into the air, his flight perhaps the most ambiguous of them all.

It's not hard to believe that someone in the world of Song of Solomon might able to fly.  Morrison crowds her plot with a number of details borrowed from Magical Realism: Milkman's Aunt Pilate, for instance, born just after her mother's death, has no navel.  Another character seems to be immortal.  Morrison's story bumps right up to the edge of realism, and when it's not fantastical, it's consistently weird.  But at the same time, it's one of Morrison's most straightforward works.  She explains in the (really great) foreword that, for Solomon, she abandoned the more complex experiments with time that characterize some of her other books because the traditional progression seemed more fitting for the male protagonist.  That's something I never would have thought of.

At its heart, Song of Solomon is a conventional novel; a bildungsroman about Milkman that follows him from his birth to his moment of "flight."  Morrison carefully details not only Milkman himself but his family--his greedy, callous father Macon, his abused mother Ruth, his sisters Lena and Corinthians, his otherworldly aunt Pilate, her granddaughter Hagar, whom he loves then abandons.  Each of these characters gets a really intricate, detailed plotline; to Morrison's credit, nothing among them seems extraneous and unnecessary.  In the second part of the novel, Milkman retraces Pilate's life history in Pennsylvania and Virginia searching for a sack of gold she described to him.  The gold, reliably, is a MacGuffin--what he really discovers is the story of his family, of flying Solomon, and the rest of his great-grandparents.  And just as reliably, he comes out of the experience a better person--regretful for the way he has treated Hagar, loving toward his parents, etc., etc.

That sounds hokey and cliched, but man, it works.  I think part of the genius of Song of Solomon is that Morrison finds the perfect balance between this well-worn structure and the accumulated strangeness of Milkman's family.  I don't think that my description of it has been really sufficient, but the book's greatness relies in its many intricate details, and I don't think reciting them here would really provide an understanding of how well they work together.

Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz

"Ruth remembered drowning. 'That's impossible,' Aunt Amanda said. 'It must have been a dream.' But Ruth maintained that she had drowned, insisted on it for years, even after she should have known better."

WARNING: Very long summary follows

Amanda grew up protecting her little sister Mattie, the parental favorite. Mattie married Carl when she was 17, and Amanda went off to nursing school without ever forgiving her sister of breaking their sisterly bond. Soon after the wedding, Mattie and Carl find themselves in an unhappy marriage that neither of them expected. Carl's remedy is to run from the situation, so he enlists in the Army, leaving his new wife and baby daughter alone.

Off nursing during WWI, Amanda meets Clement, and falls in love. She doesn't find out about his wife and three children until after their one night stand. When Amanda finds out that she is pregnant, she goes home to Mattie and there she lives with her sister and niece until little Imogene is born.

The sisters plan to tell everyone that a young homeless girl came to them in the middle of the night with labor pains, claiming that she is from a neighboring village and asking them to keep the baby, as she is unwed. This plan falls through when Mattie holds the little girl close and tells her that she will be her mother. Amanda is insane with jealousy, knowing that her daughter will never call her mother, she takes the baby and tries to leave.

However, Amanda and Mattie live on a island, and she has to cross the ice to get to land. Once she is out on the ice, Ruth, Mattie's 3 year old daughter, starts to follow her aunt. Mattie is awakened, and goes out after the others to get them back in the house, but when she picks up Ruth the ice can not hold their combined weight and they both fall through the ice. Amanda is able to save Ruth, but Mattie is drowned. Amanda then takes Imogene to a friend who recently had a stillborn daughter, claiming the previously arranged story.

Amanda raises Ruth as her own. Carl returns from the war, lives with them for about 10 years, during which he finds out that Imogene was Clement's daughter, and mistakenly assumes that his wife had an affair with Clement and died in childbirth. He goes to kill Clement, and thinks better of it, eventually accepting that his wife did not love him and becoming a sailor. He does not re-enter the book.

After Carl is gone, Ruth meets Imogene. They become fast friends, from middle school on up, until Clement's son Arthur becomes interested in Imogene. Amanda feels that she must stop this romance at all costs and begins spying on Imogene, who is at this point working in Clement's house as his wife's secretary. Amanda soon sees Clement trying to seduce her and goes to talk to him. They go out in the boat, he goes for a swim, and she leaves him. She doesn't mean for him to drown, but his body is found, more than a month later.

Amanda then tells Ruth about Imogene, who she is, why she can't marry Arthur, and what happened on that fatal night, when they both lost the ones they loved most. Amanda and Ruth write a letter to give to Imogene from Arthur, saying that he is in love with someone else. When Imogene sees the letter, she asks him if he loves another woman, and he answers, "Yes". He does in fact love Ruth, unbeknownst to either of them.

Ruth and Imogene plan to move to Chicago together, but Amanda throws herself down the stairs and breaks several bones to keep Ruth with her.

Imogene moves to Chicago, where she meets and marries another guy. They have a child and visit Ruth often as she continues to live on the Farm and to care for Amanda, while getting repeated offers of marriage from Arthur.

The writing was all right, but the plot was unnecessarily complex and the characters didn't have anything compelling about them. I didn't care if any of them died and the story would have been better if it were 100 pages long, instead of the 350 pages it took Schwarz to unravel her tale. Also, I don't think Oprah has actually read Anna Karenina.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

When eminent critic Harold Bloom says that there are only four great living American writers (McCarthy, DeLillo, Roth, and Pynchon), it is not difficult to cry sexism and racism at Toni Morrison's omission, and I say that as a person that does not bandy those terms around lightly. Yes, those four are truly great, but why not Morrison, who's style is as vivid, inspired, and tightly controlled as any of those four, and whose works speak to something truly American? In a recent poll, Beloved was voted the greatest work of literature in the past 25 years, just ahead of DeLillo's Underworld.

Beloved is the story of Sethe, an ex-slave who now lives inCincinnati with her daughter, Denver. Eighteen years prior to the main action of the story (which has a snaking, elliptical plotline), Sethe was a runaway slave living with her grandmother Baby Suggs, when suddenly she spied her old slaveowner walking into the backyard, and instead of allowing her to return to slavery, slit her baby daughter's (unnamed, not Denver) throat--and would also have done the same to Denver and her two sons, Howard and Buglar, if she had not been caught. After Sethe was released from prison and the Civil War over, she continues to be haunted by the ghost of the murdered baby until the spirit is chased out by Paul D, a fellow slave from Sethe's former plantation who comes to live with her in Cincinnati. But then the spirit takes the form of a young girl (the age the child would have been if it had lived) who emerges from the nearby lake and comes to live with Sethe, Denver, and Paul D. Lots of other crazy and magical shit happens, and all the while you learn the strange and sordid details of Sethe and Paul D's past lives as slaves. Morrison is particularly graphic about some of the details she feels have been lost in slave narratives, such as rampant slave murder and sexual abuse.

I do not think that Beloved speaks to me as it might to an African-American, and so I haven't formed an emotional connection with it like I did other books I've read this year, but it's clear reading it that it's a true monument of American fiction. It is complex, imaginative, and brilliantly but tightly conceived. Jonathan Demme made a movie about it starring Oprah, but I cannot believe that that movie is any good--partly because it doesn't seem like Beloved, which is frequently strange and obtuse, could translate to the screen, and partly because I'm not sure Oprah really has the chops to take on a character like Sethe, who is troubled, complex, and somewhat otherworldy, none of which describes Oprah.

Highly recommended.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the boy's hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

Holy shit, this is one book that's never going to be made into a movie. The guy at the library told me this was the most depressing book I'd ever read, and he was right. Cormac McCarthy's critically acclaimed novel The Road is about a nameless man and his nameless son some years after some sort of disaster that has covered the skies of the earth in ash and killed everything but some humans, who survive by foraging for canned food and eating each other. The man and boy are trekking south because the world is getting colder, and they know that they can't survive another winter wherever they are.

The thing about The Road that makes it so different from other post-apocalyptic literature like Oryx and Crake is that it is extremely short on the specifics. Whereas Margaret Atwood composed a complex social history for her eradication of the human species, McCarthy--who before this book was best known for writing Westerns--never explains what caused the events that precede the book, though the description of it is similar to the depictions of nuclear winter that became popular in the 70's and 80's. It doesn't even give a name to its characters. That's because The Road isn't a book about our society and its problems; it's about the deeper character of the human spirit/mind and its will to survive in the bleakest of odds. The man and the boy fight to live, though daily they struggle with the question of why it is exactly they want to survive, and whether or not death might be better than the road. It is human nature, distilled to its essence; all the rest is "ceremonies" constructed "out of the air."

For some reason--probably in light of accusations that her choices are often too maudlin and shallow--Oprah just recently chose The Road for her book club. What kind of response this will cause I can't imagine, but the idea of middle-aged ladies reading this super-depressing novel en masse is delightful. I may even let my mother borrow my copy.