Paradise

By Toni Morrison
Alfred A. Knopf, $25

ISBN 0679433740


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Review by Laura Wexler

Toni Morrison's "Paradise" begins on a straightforward note: "They shoot the white girl first." Beyond the first line, though, there's very little straightforward about the novel. Who are "they"? Who is the "white girl"? What does the shooting mean? The reader must wait until much later for answers to these questions, for the newest novel from the 1993 Nobel Prize Laureate unfolds slowly, like a good mystery or real life. Lingering upon seemingly trivial details, minor characters, gossip and histories unwritten in History, it creates word by word, layer upon layer, a realistic world tinged by mysticism.

It's a book that gets better
with each reading, because more
of Morrison's literary genius
is revealed each time.
"Paradise" is the story of Ruby, Oklahoma, a fictional all-black town established in 1949 by black families fleeing whites and other blacks. Built as a safe haven, Ruby is a place where black women and children can walk down the street unmolested, where black men can own thriving businesses without groveling to whites. But as the years pass, Ruby's isolation begins to endanger it -- the families become prideful and uncharitable, establishing the same kind of hierarchies and prejudices that had their ancestors fleeing in the first place. By 1977, the book's present, the self-righteous men of Ruby are poised to eliminate the group of women living peacefully outside Ruby's boundaries, in an old mansion known as the Convent.

So it is that while "Paradise" is the story of Ruby, it is also the story of the five women who are not, and never will be, a part of Ruby. In fact the women symbolize everything Ruby isn't; they are unstructured, unstoried, unrooted. They are battered, weary and unloved: Mavis is a mother accused of killing her twin babies, Pallas is a daughter betrayed by her mother, Gigi is a young woman horrified by the era's violence, Seneca is a beautiful, rich girl, abandoned as a child.

All the women are disfigured either physically or emotionally, and it is only at the Convent that they can begin to heal. Their unofficial spiritual leader, a blind Indian woman named Connie, encourages the women to create a mystical space that lies outside the religion of church, one that seems more powerful. She tells them, " . . . I will teach you what you are hungry for." And from that day on, they are no longer victims -- "they understood and began to begin." The men of Ruby sense the transformation, sense a power greater than their own. That scares and angers them, and therein lies the sense of the book's first line.

"Paradise" is an epic, challenging and complex in its movement back and forth through point of view, time frame and setting. Because it is so dense, it's able to be both specific and universal, historical and timeless, dreamlike and factual. In other words, there is everything in it. And as readers of Morrison's other novels will understand, it's a book that gets better with each reading, because more of Morrison's literary genius is revealed each time.

Laura Wexler is a freelance writer in Athens, Georgia.

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