PARADISE
By Toni Morrison
Knopf, 318 pages, $25
`Paradise,” Toni Morrison’s first novel since she received the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, starts out like a Sam Peckinpah movie-with a blast of testosterone-fueled mayhem and killing. Within the first few pages, a gang of men invade a former convent they believe now houses a witches’ coven, discover circumstantial evidence that confirms their sus-picions of Satanism and unspeak-able horror, and murder the women, some of whom have been their lovers in the bittersweet past.
Then Morrison steps back and tells the story of nearby Ruby, a nearly all-black town in dusty Oklahoma in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Ruby is a funny town, once removed from its original founding as a little place called Haven, established by about a dozen families in 1890. Haven came about when its first citizens- charcoal-skinned former slaves- were refused entry into post-Civil War white cities and the sleepy hamlets of other, lighter-skinned former slaves.
This double rejection has be-queathed the citizens of Haven, and now Ruby, a double challenge: To prosper as vengeance, and to pro-tect that prosperity at all costs. This legacy, though, demands a strict reading of history, and an equally rigid adherence to tradition. And that is both blessing and curse- blessing because the citizens of Ruby know so clearly who they are and where they come from, and curse because that knowledge can be so limiting, especially in light of life’s unanticipated and inevitable changes.
Morrison’s Ruby is an insular community, like so many that serve as setting to African-American women’s writings: Last year’s “Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven,” by Dawn Turner Trice, featured the utopian Chicago neighborhood of Lakeland; Gloria Naylor’s work nearly always relies on black communities that close themselves off; Morrison herself visited the idea in 1974 in “Sula,” her second novel.
But unlike all of those com-munities, which are populated by complex characters who share in the communal good and evil, the citizens of Ruby break down a bit too neatly into two categories: The women, who are good, and the men, who are very, very bad.
This might not be surprising in mediocre feminist novels, or in straight white male cinematic adaptations of black women’s writing (“The Color Purple”), but it is a surprise coming from Morrison, whose work has been critical of men in general, and black men in particular, but which has also given context and comfort to black male angst.
In “Paradise,” however, nearly all of the men are philandering, conniving control freaks capable of the most hideous behavior. Here, the past provides a different kind of context: By holding on to it so tightly, by protecting the perceived privileges passed down to them through the years, the men live in a strangely comfortable inferno, an imperfect paradise indeed.
Not that the women of Ruby are saints. No, these women do awful things: One leaves two babies to suffocate in a sealed, hot Cadillac, another cuts herself to relieve her emotional pain, still another kidnaps a child from a Third World country. Although she doesn’t let the women off the hook, Morrison renders the context of their actions sympathetically through cruel life stories of loneliness, abandonment, rape, violence and betrayal. These are further informed by the even greater contexts of sexism and racism, the horrible heritage of slavery.
What is surprising-perhaps even shocking-is the crude dogmatism of “Paradise.” Using the framework of turbulence provided by the ’60s and early ’70s, Morrison touches on every “ism” imaginable-racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism (actually, more like homophobia), ageism-and religious intolerance. Also, her biblical and mythological allusions-usually seamlessly ren-dered-are clumsy here, almost embarrassing. At one point, she uses a local school play to compare the original founding of Haven with the plight of Jesus and Mary find-ing no room at the inn.
Divided into chapters that each represent a particular woman and her symbolic plight, “Paradise” evolves as each of the convent’s residents find refuge there: Mavis, who steals her husband’s Cadillac and hides from the warrants awaiting her in the real world; Grace, or Gigi, who intends to stay only a while waiting for her in-carcerated boyfriend and ends up having a dangerous affair with one of the local boys; Seneca, a New Age type ahead of her time who suffers from severely internalized self-hatred; and Pallas, a teenager whose lover dumps her for her mother.
They’re all overseen by Connie, or Consolata, who has lived as a ward of the convent since she was picked up off a mound of trash by the now-dead mother superior. Connie, the former lover of one of the town’s most distinguished citizens, has made friends with her paramour’s wife, lost him to her again, and whiles away her days dispensing wisdom to her wards and drinking herself to death in the convent’s basement.
Morrison’s usually deft hand fails to give these characters meaning, to breathe life into them. They all feel like rough drafts. To make matters worse, she tends to refer to them by their relationships rather than by their names-for example, “the nephew,” as opposed to K.D.- or overworks pronouns before fully revealing who she’s talking about.
Not that Morrison’s language is any less lush, any less fierce in “Paradise” than in any of her previous work. But here, when she spins out her color and verve, it lacks the depth and urgency that has been her hallmark until now.
In “Paradise” the women are-and Morrison would no doubt reject this word-victims. They may find temporary and uneasy solace with each other, in quick conversations in town, or in the odd sisterhood of the half dozen of them who live in the former convent, but none is ever set free of her burden.
The murderous men, however, are left to roam the streets of Ruby, to be tortured by their deeds perhaps, and achieve redemption of some sort through that torture, but mostly to rewrite the story of the assault on the convent, to twist it to accommodate their lives of im-punity and plenitude.
It is unlikely that Morrison intends to set the men loose, but more likely wants to make a broader point about letting go of the past and creating a more just future. Unfortunately, “Paradise” doesn’t accomplish her goal. The ending, in particular, feels too pat, too conventionally predictable, and yet it also feels unfinished, not just because it’s so ethically vague in many ways, but because the story of the aftermath of the slaughter feels more compelling than the events that lead to it.
