When Toni Morrison gets brought up in conversation, it’s usually about her books The Bluest Eye, Beloved, or Song of Solomon. But her entire eleven-book catalog is worth reading and rereading.
Written after she had already been awarded a Pulitzer Prize as well as the Nobel Prize in Literature and had been cemented as one of America’s greatest writers, Paradise comes out swinging, and it has become one of my favorite works by Morrison.
Paradise tells the story of Ruby, a small, all-black town in Oklahoma, and the unorthodox convent of women who live several miles outside of it. Morrison explores the idea of "paradise," and how humans always end up drawing lines to exclude someone to create their definition of it. The town of Ruby has slackened the chains of racial oppression, but gender domination is just as powerful as ever, and the men of Ruby cannot stand to see a convent of untethered women so close to their ‘paradise.’
Morrison explores the ideas of freedom, exclusion, and the divine feminine in this book, and it is worth a slow, steady read-through as Morrison’s beautiful words pour over and pierce you. I highly recommend this novel.
Review by Andrew
Paradise by Toni Morrison
"Rumors had been whispered for more than a year. Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year's Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. And what went on at the Oven these days was not to be believed . . . The proof they had been collecting since the terrible discovery in the spring could not be denied: the one thing that connected all these catastrophes was in the Convent. And in the Convent were those women."
In Paradise--her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature--Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain," assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There . . . where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose." Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery