I hope to persuade you to read this difficult book, one both unsparing in its descriptions of extravagant cruelty and its consequences, but one that also introduces us to utterly real, comprehensively described human beings, to their inner lives, to the sympathies they evoke in us and those they carry inside themselves for others. I first read it maybe 30 years ago. I wasn’t ready for it. I think I was living too fast for it then. I didn’t have the capability for it then.
This is the heart of the novel: Sethe escaped slavery, was tracked by a horribly rational master called “School Teacher”, and rather than have her children be returned to bondage, took up a saw and killed her 2 year old daughter and tried to kill her sons. That event organizes the novel. It is the moment to which every thread of the novel returns, its full, abiding, most awful tapestry.
So many recent novels seem unable to create multiple characters who shimmer with the verisimilitude of life. They are too often polemical, or shallow of sustained feeling, or unbelievable in their rendering of a world or peopled by 1 driving voice and a cohort of stick figures.
In Beloved Toni Morrison gives full, vibrant life not only to Sethe, but to Denver, her surviving daughter; Paul D, her lover; Stamp Paid, the conscience of the neighborhood outside Cincinnati where Sethe lives, and Baby Suggs, her mother-in-law and one of the great portraits of goodness to be found in any novel.
The horror show of slavery is here, its everyday normalcy its worst feature, but most importantly Morrison remembers its relentless minute to minute degradation of spirit, and its legacy, a word too elegant for the blistering endowments it leaves behind — how slavery gets inside the enslaved, how it crushes the humanity of the slavers in their dealings with everyone, how it spreads through time, how it creates in the enslaved, and newly freed, the necessity for superhuman forbearance and strength just to get up and walk out the door in the morning.
I love Philip Roth and do believe some of his books will be read in the next century, but neither he, nor any other American novelist I can think of since WWII, has written a novel so revelatory and full of humanity, one that reads like a Biblical text, as if it could come from Lamentations or a long story from Isaiah or Jeremiah.
Great novels shove us off center and away from our often-stale vision of life, our too comfortable dogmas. They make us look at and feel for people not like us in almost every particular except our common, ineradicable hearts. Make us. If we give them our time and attention. Please give Beloved your attention.
