On Morrison and the act of reading - Anne Enright in LRB:

“In the spring of 1988, a series of small paperbacks by Toni Morrison arrived in Dublin to accompany the hardback of Beloved. I opened one at random in a shop called Books Upstairs, read for a while, and decided to work my way through her novels in the order they were written. I didn’t know Morrison’s image had appeared on the cover of Newsweek or that paperback rights to Beloved had just sold for a million dollars – this might have made her work less intriguing to me. Reading was so personal, it needed to feel a little private, or at least select.”

(…)

“The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel, published in 1970, opens with a brief, antic mash-up of a child’s first reading primer. ‘Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family.’ These lines are not familiar to me and then they are, sort of – it’s like seeing a person across a room and wondering if it’s someone you know. ‘We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.’ The arrival of Claudia’s narrative voice on page three brings a thrill of admiration. This was, in the Ireland of 1988, a strikingly contemporary line. It had the ring both of Greek tragedy and of the newly discovered possibility that family was not a place of safety. The narrator’s ‘we’, which seems so natural coming from a child, was a rare usage. Lots of American writers have done it since, but Morrison was ahead of that curve. There will be time, after the reading is done, to namecheck Faulkner and Thornton Wilder, to think about her use of the sermonic and collective, to note how Morrison made of this casually colloquial ‘we’ a fully political piece of grammar, but meanwhile I am reading the book like someone who knows how books are written, and that feels fine.”

(…)

“I cannot say how much I learned from Morrison’s use of voice, which democratised and elevated her characters in a way that was so generous to their spirit and situation. She sought a prose that escaped hierarchy, one that was ‘race-specific yet race-free’. Clear about the difference between the body and shame, she drew erotic attention to necks, bare calves, feet, and managed her characters’ physicality in a way that was sexy without being sexualised. She was interested in the ‘reclamation of racial beauty’ and used the word ‘beautiful’ often, notably about boys and men, whom she portrayed as the victims as well as sometimes the perpetrators of injustice. True to the feminism of the 1970s, her female characters have sexual agency. Reading Toni Morrison in the ‘over-worshipped territory of Roth, Bellow, Updike and Mailer’, the critic Laura Miller wrote, was like ‘being released from literary jail’.”

Read the article here.

This is a beautiful appraisal about so many more things than Morrison’s novels. It makes you really want to read Morrison, which is something that too many reviewers never achieve.

After a while the author starts reading books as somebody who knows how they are written, or at least think he knows how they are written. That’s a loss. But Enright proves here that we can overcome the loss, that the original adventure (“I opened one at random in a shop called Books Upstairs, read for a while, and decided to work my way through her novels in the order they were written.”) can be replaced by an experience that’s not less rewarding, quite the opposite.