Word: morrison
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Morrison chose to read the opening chapter of Paradise because, to her mind, that chapter more than the others "can stand alone" from the rest of the text. The strange truth is that the selection actually works better as a separate entity than it does as an entrance into her book...
Before the novel's publication in January, when it still bore the name Morrison had picked for it--War--Morrison had intended this moment of violence to both open and close Paradise. In so doing, the whole moral weight of histories, conflicts and biases that she unpacks throughout the novel would bear down upon the shootists (and the reader) at the climactic moment of violence...
That scheme was rejected by her publishers, and Paradise was released to the public with a mournful, creakily "mystical coda that is easily the least effective passage of the book. Even without that concluding misstep, though, the impact of the first chapter within the circular framework Morrison attempts is severely diluted by two factors...
...full an outline of the many characters' thoughts, so that later, when the same moment is revived in the novel's finale, there is little left to reveal. Of course, that broad surveying into Who Feels What lends the chapter very well to independent analysis, making Morrison's reading a strong, emotionally-rich teaser for readers who, unfortunately, are not likely to have their curiosity sated by the way Paradise plays...
Whatever the disappointments of her material--and granted, these shortcomings would almost certainly go unnoticed coming from any other author--Morrison stood proud atop the evening like the Tall Ships in our harbor, her elocution marvelous and her words like banners unfurled. Her delivery maintained a patrician exactitude--affording the word "vegetable" its deserved four syllables, crisply enunciating the second "t" in "tomatoes"--that rivaled her beautiful prose itself as a tribute to our language...