It’s a strange, disturbing thing to read a contemporary Toni Morrison novel – a woman who has been at home for decades exorcising the demons of our collective American past. Yet even in the present day, her characters are hung up on ghosts. God Help the Child is a story, like all Morrisonian tales, woven in different voices, all tied to the cycle of abuse that starts in childhood and seems to never end. There’s Sweetness, a mother who finds it impossible to love her too-dark child, Lula Ann. There’s Bride, the reborn adult version of Lula-Ann, wielding her beauty like a scythe across the scorched western landscape. There’s Booker, a man who refuses to let go of his dead brother who was brutally murdered when they were just boys.
At times, the abuse is overwhelming. No one in this Morrison novel is left untouched. It almost verges on melodramatic parody as each dark secret is revealed. In some ways the novel comes across as a bourgeois version of Precious, where instead of an inner city girl, we have a fashionista – both surrounded by horrors that know no bounds. Oprah and Lee Daniels must be drooling over this.
But Morrison refuses to let the reader get away that easily. The novel can not be dismissed as artsy, exploitative trash. The book is as insular, intimate and twisted as her A Mercy was expansive, remote and mangled (in oh so many beautiful ways). Her handling of the surreal adds an otherworldly gravity to an otherwise modern tract. Continue reading
