Word: morrisons
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Roth, Updike and Morrison have new novels out this fall, and in each of them they return to a story they first told much earlier in their careers. In The Widows of Eastwick, out Oct. 21, Updike has dreamed up a sequel to his novel of suburban sorcery, The Witches of Eastwick. In Indignation, published in September, Roth retells the story of Portnoy's Complaint, the brilliant, pneumatically obscene book that made him famous. And in A Mercy, due out in November, Morrison--the last American writer to win a Nobel Prize for Literature--tells the story of a mother...
...Morrison's vision has never been much in need of this kind of enlarging. Her work has always been epic in scope. In Beloved, Morrison told the story of Sethe, a woman who murdered her own child rather than see her sold into slavery. Early on in A Mercy, we watch a mother do the opposite--she puts her daughter Florens up for sale: "Please, Senhor. Not me. Take her. Take my daughter." It's a less bloody moment, but in its way it's no less chilling. A Mercy is that daughter's tale...
...tell it, Morrison reaches back in time--way back. Beloved was set in 1873, in the chaos of postbellum America. A Mercy is set in 1680, when America was nothing more than a loose amalgamation of Indians, religious zealots and malodorous trappers and traders wandering a continent over which territorial lines had been only lightly and provisionally sketched...
...Morrison is mooting the perversely hopeful possibility that slavery could have existed without racism or at least without racism as we know it. She lavishes some of her best writing in years on this pre-Revolutionary world, making it so luminous and complex that her characters are in danger of dissolving in it. A Mercy shows us America in the moment before race madness ruined it--it is a wounded land, but the wound has not yet turned septic...
...Widows and Indignation Updike and Roth are gently upbraiding their younger selves for their narrowness of vision, for their lack of interest in the world around them, in A Mercy, Morrison is urging her younger self, the tortured soul who fashioned the infernal vision that is Beloved, to look even further--beyond the veil of pain and anger, however righteous, to hope. There was a time before the present misery, Morrison seems to be telling herself. And therefore, maybe, there will be a time after...