“Sethe, a former slave living in Reconstruction-era Ohio, is haunted by the daughter she killed to save from slavery. Pulitzer Prize 1988.”
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Beloved is Toni Morrison's 1987 novel, the Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the most-taught and most-banned American novels of the late twentieth century. Sethe, a former slave who escaped from a Kentucky plantation called Sweet Home in 1855, now lives in Reconstruction-era Cincinnati with her teenage daughter Denver. The house at 124 Bluestone Road is haunted: not metaphorically, not subtly, but with the specific spite of a young child's ghost. When Paul D, another Sweet Home survivor, arrives looking for Sethe, he drives the ghost out. Then a young woman calling herself Beloved arrives, and the novel that follows is what happens.
Morrison is one of the great American prose stylists of the twentieth century, and Beloved is the book in which her project is most fully realized. The non-linear narrative structure (the novel moves between Sweet Home in the 1850s, Cincinnati in the 1870s, and the present narrative of 1873) is the same project as the novel's central question: how to live in a present that has not finished happening. The Margaret Garner historical case from which Morrison drew the novel is treated with the moral seriousness it earned. The prose is one of the best contemporary American sentences.
Recommended as required American literary fiction reading, as the canonical text on slavery's afterlife in American consciousness, and as one of the novels that justifies Morrison's Nobel Prize in Literature (1993). The 1998 Jonathan Demme film starring Oprah Winfrey is worth attention. Toni Morrison's own audiobook narration is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
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