LITERATURE: Beloved – Writing

This is perhaps the easiest reading of the novels I’ve been through lately, and I believe that’s due to Toni Morrison’s writing style that I can totally appreciate as both reader and writer.

It went on that way and might have stayed that way but one evening, after supper, after Sethe, he came downstairs, sat in the rocker and didn’t want to be there.  He stood up and realized he didn’t want to go upstairs either.  Irritable and longing for rest, he opened the door to Baby Suggs’ room and dropped off to sleep on the bed the old lady died in.  That settled it–so it seemed.  It became his room and Sethe didn’t object–her bed made for two had been occupied by one for eighteen years before Paul D came to call.  And maybe it was better this way, with young girls in the house and him not being her true-to-life husband.  In any case, since there was no reduction in his before-breakfast or after-supper appetites, he never heard her complain.

It went on that way and might have stayed that way, except one evening, after supper, after Sethe, he came downstairs and lay on Baby Suggs’ bed and didn’t want to be there.  (p. 115)

In this way, Morrison shows us a change in Paul D that he himself is not yet aware of.  While they are still having sexual relations (before-breakfast, etc.), he has been falling asleep at night in the rocker. It is a break in routine that is a gradual pulling away from Sethe(?), the house(?) or simply his own nature.  In repeating the first line in the paragraphs (with a minor change) Morrison emphasizes the meaning, the non-change that must change.

There is a wonderful weaving of time, different segments of past and present, that slowly reveals the mysteries of the ghost, Beloved, and the horrors are fed to us bits at a time, as if Morrison isn’t sure that with the evils that these people have endured can be handled in the acceptance either by her character or her readers all at once.  And yet, from the very first page the worst imaginable has been told–the death of a baby.

There are a few places, however, where I feel Morrison falls just a bit into overtelling; explaining something that we’ve finally guessed at by ourselves.  Marquez has done this, but I found his to be done in a more simple and forthright manner, perhaps because it was suddenly clear (in case we didn’t catch it) in one short statement rather than going on for pages.  For example, in explaining, this far into the book, once more about Denver’s sense of immediate self and her resentment of the past in which she doesn’t share. 

But Morrison is easy to forgive.