Book Review: God Help the Child is the final novel by the last U.S. novelist to earn the Nobel Prize, Toni Morrison (1931-2019). What an amazing journey Morrison takes us on. Over 45 years, eleven novels, a thousand magic moments. From eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye (1970) to corporate exec Lula Ann Bridewell here, full circle, stories of childhood and color. As with her recent novels, Morrison no longer beats us over the head with her brilliance, demanding that we, everyone, recognize her genius. Now she works more through suggestion, subtlety, half the story is between the lines. And yet in God Help the Child, as with her previous work Home (2012), she still imbues these smaller, quieter novels with instances of horror. Perhaps some academic will, or has, written about the use of terrorizing events in the work of Toni Morrison.
Her novels divide into three eras. The first five (from The Bluest Eye to Beloved (1987) are brilliant, dazzling, shattering, the kind of work a Nobel Prize is built on. In the middle we Find Jazz (1992), one of my favorites, which began her move to simpler, more straightforward work, but not yet as plain and unadorned as she was to achieve. Paradise (1997), despite rubbing shoulders with Faulkner and García Márquez, is my least favorite of her books, one I just never got on with. I'd suggest it was an experiment in a direction that she chose for whatever reason (it was her first novel published after receiving the Nobel) not to revisit. Then the last four (Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), Home, and this) are achingly simple, honest, direct, told straight, but with all the genius of the earlier books. Readers shouldn't overlook this quartet because they're quieter, subtler, "smaller." Morrison had learned to put across what she had to say without the blazing display of the early books. She had nothing left to prove and could write for herself, short and sharp, without the flash. She'd moved past her magnificent technique (she knew how to write a novel) to rely more on voice. They suggest and evoke more than tell -- the reader needs to go deeper. The last novels are just as strong even without the luminous gifts she used to shower over the pages (it seemed) so easily. She'd dropped the electric guitar to pick up an acoustic, and her song was all the clearer for that.
In God Help the Child every child has been damaged by adults. All the characters (except Booker who seems almost magically perfect) are, as all humans are, flawed and imperfect. None are completely likable. In a way this seems like Morrison's version of authors such as Marian Keyes or Jennifer Weiner, stories involving a young woman striving for love and success. At the same time she slipped loose of Márquez and Faulkner to be purely herself. She has one character investigate history and conclude that "most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labor, sharecropping, racism ... were all about money. Money withheld, money stolen, money as power, as war." The same character reads some of what I guess are Morrison's chosen books: Eco, Remembering Slavery, Twain, Douglass, Melville, Dickens, Benjamin. She mentions a number of authors within. That said, much of the book was uneven: moments didn't ring true, seemed awkward, stretched, trying too hard. But at the end she won me over. She's Toni Morrison after all. A heart as big as all outdoors. This was her first contemporary novel. A little magical realism, a little of today, a little like nobody else. God Help the Child could have been titled Love, A Mercy, or Home, as in all four books she addresses the fundamental elements of humanity. [3★]
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