Word: prizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Morrison has learned since, of course, that the Nobel Prize carries burdens somewhat heavier than the problem of what to wear to the celebration. Although every writer drifts into daydreams of winning the prize, actually having it can produce some nightmarish side effects. A crushing mantle of gravitas descends on the winners...
...African-American woman, Morrison knew that some people would believe, even if they wouldn't say it out loud, that the notoriously inconsistent Swedish committee, often swayed by geopolitical rather than literary criteria, had given her the prize because of what she was rather than what she wrote. But Morrison shrugs off these suspicions, which have accompanied every upward step of her career. "When I heard I'd won," she says, "you heard no 'Aw, shucks' from me. The prize didn't change my inner assessment of what I'm capable of doing, but I welcomed it as a public...
...Come Prepared or Not at All" appears on page 13 of Morrison's new novel, Paradise (Knopf; 318 pages; $25), her first since winning the prize. The curious and somehow ominous phrase that she stumbled across some six years ago, before her life grew exhaustingly complicated, has finally blossomed into a book published in a first printing of 400,000 copies. And Paradise was controversial even before it went on sale. Jump-the-gun reviews have ranged from the splenetic ("a clunky, leaden novel"--the New York Times) to the ecstatic ("the strangest and most original book that Morrison...
...conceived Paradise as the final installment of a trilogy that began with Beloved (1987). That haunting tale of a mother, an escaping slave, who loved her daughter so fiercely that she killed her rather than allowing her to be taken back into bondage by her pursuers won the Pulitzer Prize. It was followed in 1992 by Jazz, in which the love of a man for a younger woman turns violent in the Harlem of the 1920s. The form of love anatomized in Paradise is a hunger for security, the desire to create perfection in an imperfect world...
Morrison has argued for years that stories and storytelling convey information, necessary information, available nowhere else. She made this case again in her Nobel Prize address: "The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience, it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie." To read Morrison as an allegorist or a sloganeer is to overlook completely the power...