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LOVE

Name: LOVE
Author: Toni Morrison
ISBN: 0-375-40944-0

by Toni Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 2003

One of Morrison’s finest, and a heartening return to Nobel–worthy form.

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A black patriarch’s obsessive domination of the many women in his life is relentlessly scrutinized in the 1993 Nobel winner’s intricately patterned eighth novel.

An opening monologue spoken by an unidentified elderly woman reminisces about the once-vibrant, now-defunct Florida Hotel and Resort (a “playground” for affluent black people) owned by the late Bill Cosey: a rags-to-riches millionaire revered for his benevolence and his ability to attract and possess beautiful women. We’re soon introduced to Junior Viviane, a runaway and reform-school veteran who answers an ad for a “Companion, Secretary” placed by Cosey’s (much younger) widow Heed (born, wretchedly poor, as Heed the Night Johnson). Then, in a gorgeous deployment of enigmatic flashbacks, Morrison focuses in turn on elderly May Cosey, the widow of Cosey’s son Billy Boy; May’s daughter Christine, the old man’s only surviving blood relative, who had fled the Resort and forfeited her birthright; and the silent, judging presence who has observed them all: Cosey’s legendary chef, known only as L. As Junior expertly seduces Romen, the adolescent grandson of Sandler and Vida Gibbons (both of whom had been employed by Cosey), Christine’s rage, May’s paranoid fear of racial unrest as a threat to her security (“for years, she hoarded and buried, and preserved and stole”), and the frail heed’s stranglehold on the Cosey property and history, all meld, as the novel’s climactic events deepen the enigma of Cosey (who’s present only in retrospect): a fructifying paternal figure, and perhaps also an unconscionable predator (or, as L. wryly concludes, “an ordinary man ripped, like the rest of us, by wrath and love”). Incorporating elements from earlier Morrison novels (notably Jazz, Paradise, and Sula), Love is an elegantly shaped epic of infatuation, enslavement, and liberation: a rich symbolic mystery that grows steadily more eloquent and disturbing as its meanings clarify and grip the reader.

One of Morrison’s finest, and a heartening return to Nobel–worthy form.

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2003

ISBN: 0-375-40944-0

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
RECITATIF
by Toni Morrison

- BOOK REVIEW
GOODNESS AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION
by Toni Morrison edited by David Carrasco Stephanie Paulsell Mara Willard

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SOURCE OF SELF-REGARD
by Toni Morrison

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HADES
by Mark Z. Danielewski

- BOOK REVIEW
HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.