Only goodness offers compensation for such hardship

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Toni Morrison’s new novel is a slight piece of work distinguished by its fine prose and by a chapter halfway through that exhibits both wisdom and restraint. The fine prose is mostly of the sensory-descriptive kind but it assumes unusual importance in a novel where physical environment is all. The chapter concerns Noella, a character previously confined to being the third wife of Salem Money, grandfather of the main characters, Frank and Ycidra (“Cee”). Mean, haughty, discourteous — in Toni Morrison’s world, where the possibility of human goodness is the only compensation for so much scarcity and hardship, Noella occupies the role of evil witch, big bad wolf, wicked stepgrandmother.

The novel’s unfolding present is concerned with the adult Frank, recently returned from the Korean War and lacking a sense of purpose. He finds one soon enough when he receives a letter stating that his sister is in danger. The chapter devoted to Noella — eight pages in all — is one of many that provides the backstory, and lends significance to Frank’s quest. It returns to a number of details from earlier in the book, without simply turning them on their heads. Morrison’s shifts in perspective work to expand and enrich, not invert or undercut.

We already know that Noella has a $500 life-insurance payment from her first husband’s death. Now we discover that this dead husband was “a sweet man... caring, energetic and a good Christian”, shot during the Depression “by someone who wanted or envied his gas station”.

Noella, having left Alabama in grief and fear, moved to Lotus, Georgia, where she met Salem Money, and housed his extended family. Her acts of cruelty (water instead of milk on Frank and Cee’s shredded wheat) were committed within a greater context of generosity, and could be seen as the result of frustration at her loss of privacy. The harshness with which Noella spoke about Cee’s birth (“born in the ... gutter”) arose from an altogether more pitying estimation. “The circumstances of Cee’s birth did not bode well,” she reflects, and it proves true enough.

But the Noella chapter isn’t simply a case of Morrison taking advantage of privileged knowledge, or stressing her superior awareness. She doesn’t extend soft sympathy to Noella, or chastise Frank and Cee — and the reader with them — for passing judgment. Even here, in the chapter devoted to her, Noella emerges as the bristly Noella we knew and disliked. After she suffers a stroke, the neighbouring women who bring her food and bathe her and sweep her floor, so appalled by her conduct, “didn’t even have to say out loud what they understood to be true: that the Lord Works in Mysterious Ways His Wonders to Behold”.

Morrison’s writing is rare in that it neither flatters the principles, nor reflects the concerns of the average striver in capitalist society. Rather, the experiences it portrays encourage humility and a sense of proportion. Her characters are driven not by ambition or best-case idealism but instinct and need — low-level desire at the very most.

Frank, orphaned, impoverished, shell-shocked, knows the heat of the Texas-Louisiana border (“You can’t come up with words that catch it”) and the cold of Korea (which “clings like a kind of glue you can’t peel off”). The best he can hope for, in the unwelcoming environment of America before civil rights, is temperate weather, his sister’s survival, and maybe — if he’s lucky — a glimpse of the back of a woman’s knees, “that seldom noticed, ooo-so-vulnerable flesh”.

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