Toni Morrison’s most famous novel is Beloved, which is about a woman named Sethe who escapes slavery, gives birth on the road, makes it to Ohio where her children and mother-in-law are already, and then everything gets worse. She’s haunted for eighteen years by the ghost of her toddler, a little girl who moves things and torments the residents. We’re told that Sethe’s two sons leave upon first appearance of the ghost, whom Sethe calls Beloved (because that’s all that’s on her daughter’s headstone), but her youngest child, Denver, stays. Then, Paul D., who was a slave on the same plantation as Sethe, appears out of nowhere after eighteen years and begins a relationship with Sethe.
It’s hard to describe the plot of Beloved. Now that I’ve finished it, I can explain it; however, that’s not how Morrison writes. Indirectly we get the full story of why Denver still lives with her mother, why Paul D. has returned, why the sons left, and we get to experience Beloved the ghost incarnate. I read this novel with Biscuit, and as I told her, there is a writing style I describe as “toilet flushing.” Basically, there is a heart to the story, but the author doesn’t write us in that direction. No, they circle around it — around, around, around — before we get there, typically in the last chapter. Toni Morrison includes flashbacks, hints, suggestions, vague allusions . . . and they’re all out of order. For no reason that makes the book better is Beloved disorganized. In fact, I told Biscuit that if we weren’t reading it together, I would have DNF’d.
In some cases, I had to read the same 2-3 sentences about five times (no exaggeration) to figure out what was even going on. Have you ever read a poem and got zero understanding out of it, but then the poet tells you their inspiration, or what they were going for, and then you can totally understand the allusions in the poem? That’s how a big chunk of Beloved is, and I saw no reason to have to fight so hard the whole way through. The writing wasn’t more poetic, it was more obtuse.
I will say that Morrison writes about slavery differently from many others, differently in that it was more brutal, and likely more realistic. I’m accustomed to whipping and raping, and as pained as I am to write this, it’s so expected in a novel about slavery in the U.S. that I feel anger that too-quickly dissipates. Morrison, on the other hand, either writes straight about or alludes to other horrifying acts perpetrated against the slaves in Beloved, and it’s all the more personal because the plantation has seven people captive there, not hundreds. While my brain can stupidly tra-la-la past atrocities I’ve read repeatedly, Morrison wasn’t going to let people like me get away with forgetting.
Ultimately, Beloved is a book about why people need to forget, though. I had this naive idea that if someone can heal their heart, they can heal themselves. But in Sethe’s and Paul D.’s worlds, an open heart is a death sentence. I thought Beloved returning would dissolve Sethe’s guilt and make things right for this mother. If only the titular character made more sense, though. Was her goal to harm Paul D. and Sethe? To come back in the flesh and live happily with her own mother? Morrison’s character was so inconsistent that Biscuit and I shrugged and realized we got one main thing out of reading Beloved: now we can be pretentious and say, “Of course we’ve read Beloved! Haven’t you??”
Grab the Lapels 
I tried, a long time ago, but I gave up the fight about half way through.
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You have to focus like you’re about take a life-or-death reading exam.
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I was absolutely blown away when I read Beloved (and learned about Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison) for the first time, a couple of years ago. I loved her style. Yes I guess she does circle around the point, but she does so to build up tension, so when you do work out what’s going on, or what seems to be going on, and why it had to be that way, you feel it much more deeply than if it were just told baldly at the beginning.
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I don’t mind the circling, but the sentences that don’t even make sense do me in. I’m glad you liked this one. It’s possible that I felt differently about it because I used to teach Black Lit to college students, so I’ve read a number of portrayals of slavery and what heinous acts a person will do for love that were more clearly written. In the end, it’s like Beloved left me with a feeling (which is good!) but not clarity (which makes the content outside the emotions forgettable).
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You’re right, the Black perspective was completely new to me.
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Like you, I had to read parts of this over and over to make sense of what was happening (but I preserved so that I could tick it off the ‘classics/ essential reading’ list.
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Alright! We’re in the same leaky boat 😂
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I found my copy of this yesterday but now having read your reaction I feel confident in putting into my “donate” bag without having read it.
Yes I know it’s a classic and deals with important issues but I just know from your description that it would drive me crazy trying to keep up with her looping style.
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I was fortunate to have a buddy reader to help me remember the details and wade through her book. I’m thinking it might just be Morrison’s style to leave much to guess; I had a hard time with the ending of Sula, too.
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Ugh… Oh well, my copy has now left the house
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Ah, sorry to see this book was a struggle for you (and Biscuit). It’s a title that’s been on my TBR for a while and I only ever seem to see praise for it, so it’s interesting to get another take. I’ve only read one Morrison novel so far (Sula), which I found challenging but ultimately rewarding, so I’ve been wanting to try more of her work. Now I’m not sure whether this should be my next Morrison novel after all, but reframing the atrocities of slavery so that the reader can’t possibly look away or forget does sound worth visiting to me, so I think I’ll keep it on my list for now.
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I enjoyed The Bluest Eye and did not care for Sula. That ending. What was that ending even supposed to mean? All my brain could figure out was that Sula was a terrible person. I think.
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Ah, The Bluest Eye is another one on my TBR, perhaps I’ll pick that one up before Beloved.
It’s been a little while since I read Sula so I don’t remember everything, but doesn’t it end with Sula’s death disrupting the peace she inspired in her community, and her friend realizing how much she loved Sula (as a friend) all along, though she’d been denying the friendship in order to fit into the community? If I remember right Sula was a sort of symbol for independence and nonconformity which went unappreciated in her lifetime, but then her friend realized with Sula’s death that it was her husband and her life of conformity that she didn’t like, rather than Sula. Sula is definitely a complex character who doesn’t always do good things, but she’s free in a way that most of her community isn’t and they envied her that, I think, in a way that made them hateful toward her.
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I remember Sula left for the city then came back, slept with the main character’s husband, and then told the main character what a wet mop she was. I guess I didn’t read deeply into what Sula was attempting to accomplish with that…. Yes, Sula was dying, I remember that.
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Yes, I think all that is correct, but if I remember right Sula’s friend was more upset with her husband in the end for the cheating than with Sula, since he was the one who’d made a commitment to her. She was upset that she’d followed the rules and still gotten burned, while Sula felt free to do what she wanted- and she’d abandoned Sula years earlier when there was some accident with a kid falling in the river, I think, so the friend (Nel, I had to finally look it up) wasn’t blameless either, but she’d tried to hide her failings to fit in while Sula got to just be herself. I think there’s a lot going on beneath the surface level in the story, but honestly I’m not sure how much of it I would’ve gotten on my own, I was lucky to be able to read it with a class!
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That does sound like an informative class. My only concern would be the way some professors and teachers like to tell you what’s going on rather than opening a door for you to explore what happened.
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Oh, I only had one class where the teacher basically lectured at us about exactly what was in the book and what it was doing and why, and it was awful! I completely agree, that’s a bad approach. But not the Sula class, luckily- that one had a good teacher who mostly opened up the class time for student discussion. Most of my lit classes were aimed at writers, so we weren’t short of student analysis. The only debates I actually enjoyed in school, lol.
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I think reading in this kind of style is like reading poetry; it’s not any harder than other reading, but if you don’t do it very often it feels very disorienting and unfamiliar. Over the years, I’ve read more and more fiction like this and it now feels very comfortable to me; I’m still practicing with poetry and I do not have the kind of understanding that I feel like I need to have in order to discuss/describe what’s at work with a poem that I’m reading. Nothing about Morrison’s style is accidental or unfinished, but whether one’s inclined to sort it all out, that’s quite another thing. She’s one of my MRE (must read everything) authors and I am reading a number of books about slavery this year, but I don’t know if I’ll feel drawn to reread this one; there are so many books on the theme to explore. When I’m a little further in my project, I might ask you for some rec’s!
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If I’m reading a famous African American author, my must-read-everything person is Zora Neale Hurston, whose dialect is quite challenging, but whose vivid imagery and humor always comes through. I’m glad you get on so well with Morrison. Beyond the writing style, I still felt there were gaps in what I was supposed to make of several moments. Why is Beloved seducing Paul D., for example.
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You know how sometimes when you are listening to a certain song, there is a gap, a pause, a silence? And something about that makes you like the song even more, which is weird because it’s the absence of song? Even if I were to mention a song here, it’s probably not a shared favourite between us. But that’s how I think Morrison’s gaps work. They have a purpose, but not everyone is going to feel it, feel it in a good way I mean, and not everyone who doesn’t feel it is going to be curious enough to read one of the kajillions of books/articles about her/the book to decipher it. You’ve still got some Hurston earmarked to read, I’m sure. (As do I!) Along with tonnes of others.
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“Toilet flushing” is such a great description of a few books I’ve read! I’m going to have to remember that.
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It’s not even meant to be an insult, but “toilet flushing” comes to mind before “whirl pooling,” or something like that.
p.s. There is a new craft beer from Bell’s called “No Yeah.” 😂
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Ahahaha, the greatest Midwestern name ever. :3
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Great review! It’s been a couple years but I felt a lot of the same things. I like the character/ghost of Beloved as a way of delving into the past and the pain (and as you point out, Morrison focuses on slavery in a different way) but I was left with a lot of questions too.
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One big question is why did she seduce Paul D? She already ran him out of the house. Was the plan for Sethe to catch Paul D. and Beloved in the act and then kick him out? That never happened, so I guess I missed whatever the point was.
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That’s a good question…I can’t recall now if I had a theory about that!
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To me, this scene is a presentation of the desire to control, and a desire to individualise and separate from the homogeneity of life at 124 on Beloved’s part. It serves as the pinnacle of Paul D’s powerlessness- at the hand of muted fear, a fall to submission. This powerlessness is again bolstered on an emotional level, Paul D forcibly engages in the memory of compliance[days at sweethome], reconnecting with his buried traumas of life on the plantation. In both a twist of irony and subversion, he calls “Beloved” at his dominator’s will. A woman he does not love, but rather fears for her ability to control, manipulate and strip him of his own selfish desires- Both of power and lust.
It becomes a subverted scene of averted desire and reversal of the female/male interplay seen yet in the novel. Furthering the idea of communal chaos, juxtaposing the disorder and the illusions of patriarchal hierarchy seen on sweethome and in the white community.
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I never saw Paul D’s desires as selfish, including his tender feelings for Sethe and his sexual relationship with her, which she desired, too. However, I can see how Beloved might find his desires selfish. I never saw him as just a man who appeared at Sethe’s home and wanted to move himself in, but a man with a traumatic history in search of place, love, comfort, and familiarity, even if that familiar face was best known in a place of horror.
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I had to read this in high school! I was a sophomore! I barely remember anything about it. But it’s on my Classics Club list as a reread. I’m sorry it didn’t work for you.
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I’m really surprised this was a high school read. It has all kinds of sexual and physical violence. There must have been some parent somewhere who had an aneurysm.
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Good point! It was private school so probably not… haha
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I haven’t read Beloved!!!! It’s definitely one of those books that you feel you should read, but I’m sorry that it didn’t turn out well for you. The toilet flushing reference is a good one, I tend to despise books like that too so I’m not sure how well I’ll do if I finally read this.
Have you read Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black? I found her depiction of slavery particularly brutal and violent, so I wonder how that would compare to Morrison’s depictions of it. It just takes that one particular passage, that one character’s story to bring us back to how horrible a time it was in our history. It makes me shudder, but I feel strong enough to read it, even if it’s just so I can remind others who aren’t strong enough to read it, that we must never forget about it.
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I haven’t read Washington Black, but I’ve read several reviews of it. It seems like the kind of book that really divided people right down the middle, with some readers enjoying the ride and others wondering where they were going.
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I think Canadians loved it because Esi is Cdn, but others were more objective haha
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It’s such an important book but so hard to read, and not just for what it makes us face. I don’t think I could manage it again and I’m not entirely SURE I read the whole thing last time. I’m glad it exists, though.
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I think the experience might be different in a literature course because a) the students could discuss it, and b) there’s a lot of fodder for writing a paper and students not getting the same thing out of it. There’s room for interpretation because so much is left loose.
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I struggled reading this in my teens, especially as people were recommending it and it was embarrassing to admit I didn’t understand it. I will go back to it I’m sure because now I understand better the nature of the spiralling narrative.
I just finished reading A Mercy which is brilliant and about a third the way in I spiralled back to the first chapter and then did so often as I read, realising what this structure was doing, the constant first person narrator surrounded by various other 3rd person perspectives.
It was like climbing the tree and occasionally stopping to regard the view and then arriving at the top and realising, seeing, Wow! Incredible. Genius. Loved it.
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When I was teaching literature to freshmen college students, I often told them, “Before you start writing your paper, go back and re-read chapter one.” It’s amazing how often chapter one tells you exactly what you need to know about the whole book, but you don’t get it when you read it because you haven’t been on the journey yet.
I’ve been reading more about Morrison’s work on Goodreads and noticed that a lot of times when someone compares a book to Morrison’s, other readers take that to mean this other person’s work is not for them either. Morrison certain has a style, and it’s not really one that I appreciate….
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Hello! I also read Beloved recently and I had a similar experience. I am glad did read it, but it was not an enjoyable experience – the story itself is daunting, and the narrative style was quite difficult to follow.
And you’re right, there’s a different approach to slavery compared to other books I read on this topic. It’s a hopeless, violent, non-human approach … might be the closest to reality, I don’t know, but it’s surely the most difficult to read about.
Have you read other books by Toni Morrison? Or would you like to read other books, after Beloved?
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Hi, Gerogiana! I’m so glad to see you here 🙂 I’ve also read The Bluest Eye, which contains child rape, and Sula, which felt pointless to me. It was a relentlessly mean story, but I didn’t “get” why Sula was so . . . not great to the main character. Thus, I’m kind of done with Morrison’s fiction. I might check out her essays. I’m a huge fan of Zora Neale Hurston and like Alice Walker as alternatives of masterful black female writers.
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Hello! I’m also not very eager to read again Toni Morrison, only after reading Beloved.
I’ve never heard of Zora Neale Hurston nor Alice Walker, thanks a lot for the recommendations! 😀
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With Alice Walker I would recommend her novel The Color Purple. For Zora Neale Hurston I would start with a book like Moses, Man of the Mountain. Hurston’s most famous book is written in a black southern dialect and can be confusing.
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