But her novels about them are getting smaller, in every sense she seems to be losing patience with her own stories. Generational legacies, hauntings, ghosts, and the persistent effects of racism and sexism are Morrison's enduring themes: they are big ones. There is no dearth of possibilities, after all: as a species we are deficient in many ways, but we have a talent for atrocity. The instalment plan can turn history into a warehouse of horrors: which abuse shall we summon next, which barbarity shall we recount? It is not that novelists should shy away from historical trauma, far from it: but their job is to find something interesting to say about evil, rather than simply announcing its existence, being outraged, and going home.
But after nearly half a century, denouncing brutality becomes a fairly circular enterprise. It has been 42 years since the publication of The Bluest Eye (1970), her groundbreaking first novel about self-hatred and incestuous rape in the black community. The nobility and necessity of the enterprise does not quite offset the sense of weariness that comes from that "another instalment", and Updike had a point: exposure of infamies and hardship is a fairly limited artistic ambition.Īt Morrison's best, in novels such as Beloved (1987) and Song of Solomon (1977), she did much more than expose: she sang, excoriated, harrowed, educated, mythologised and uplifted.
R eviewing Toni Morrison's last novel, A Mercy (2008), in the New Yorker, John Updike referred to it as "another instalment of her noble and necessary fictional project of exposing the infamies of slavery and the hardships of being African-American".
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