| Show 2E The Salt Lake Tribune Sunday September 13 1987 Toni Morrison novel is love song to (( Beloved by Toni Morrison Knopf $1893 '(The title of Toni Morrison s fifth (novel may mislead the unwary Though it is indeed about love is no steamy romanre And though the prose does heat up at tunes it is to praise a people rather than to fashion scenes of romantic 275 pp ! ( bliss I’! Set in Ohio and Kentucky before Snd after the Civil War Beloved is ( Morrison’s love song to can survival It is a tribute to Afro-Amer- i- family-'makin- g to indand culture-makinividual heroics and communal to women nurturing children upaided by men and to men unmanned by racism's withering blast ((And if the book occasionally strains too hard for effect — Morrison’s I yaunted lyricism leaping into the Stratosphere — Beloved still has the gravity and eloquence of classic American literature Its story is stark and primeval ((its pacing is measured the chapters ringing the changes again and again ( oh the novel's pivotal events Its ’themes of strife and reconciliation (defeat and survival death and resur- rection are explored with uncommon ( majesty ((“Beloved" is first of all a love sto- rr In its simplest form it is about an ( illiterate slave woman named Sethe with “iron eyes and backbone to ( match” who escapes from a farm in Kentucky to freedom in Cincinnati ( and tries desperately to keep her fam- Ily together IWith the aid of free blacks and ( sathite abolitionists her three children ’(sons Howard and Buglar and a (daughter called Crawling-AlreadyBaby) precede her to freedom anoth-- ( er daughter Denver is born just as Sethe is about to be ferried across the ( Ohio River Her husband Halle sepa- rated from her during the escape is I presumed dead vivid rendering ((In Morrison's nothing is told in a straightforward 1 linear fashion Past and present the magical and the mundane are min-- ( fled in one sinuous ’ narrative g self-((iel- p ? The story is told most often from Sethe’s point of view but also by her daughters or by Paul D a fellow slave on the Kentucky farm which they had called Sweet Home though ultimately it was neither home nor sweet to the enslaved Sometimes too we view the events from a communal perspective through the eyes of the Cincinnati black community as a whole The past for Sethe and her family is enslavement at the hands of relatively benign owneis Mr Garner treats his five male slaves with respect teaches some to read and count takes seriously their suggestions about improving life on Sweet Home Sethe and her mother-in-la- known as Baby Suggs stay out of the fields and tend to the laundering cooking and sewing alongside Mrs Garner None of Sethe and Halle’s children are sold off to make money for the Garners And on Sundays Halle is permitted to hire himself out to nearby farms earning money that will eventually buy his mother's freedom and send her to Ohio's free soil The past is also the slavery they experience after Mr Garner’s death d man whom under the the slaves call Schoolteacher because he is constantly measuring them and recording the results in a notebook We gradually realize that he is not a schoolteacher at all but a eugenicist intent on demonstrating the inferiority of his charges via his dubious science mean-spirite- More martinet than mentor Schoolteacher institutes a strict regimen unknown under the Garners Reflecting on those times Paul D remembers: “Everything rested on Garner being alive Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces Now ain’t that slavery or what is it?” Soon enough there are whippings and soon enough the slaves are plotting escape Some make it some don’t Sixo who taunts his captors with bitter laughter is roasted alive for his audacity Paul D is sold and after killing his new owner consigned Portrait of artist Mary Cassatt Mary Cassatt by Nancy Mowll Mat- thews Abrams-Th- e Library of Ameri- can Art 160 pp $35 was Cassatt (1844-1926- ) ( America’s first woman artist to gain international recognition and an im- piortant contributor to the Impres-- ( ejonist movement tv Nancy Mowll Matthews provides a concise clear overview of Cassatt’s life and work in this visually impresn sive second volume of the collaboration the Library of American Art For this volume and its intentions Matthews’ portrait of Cassatt properly fixes on the artist’s work using the sketchiest of personal details to illuminate the growth and development of the art But it is rich in examples — 50 in color — of her work — David E Anderson UPI Abrams-Smithsonia- Best Sellers Now Voffc Tlnvw tonric Ito listings below ore based on soles figures from 2000 bookstores United States in every region of the Rctton This Week 1 ' Presumed Innocent 1 Patriot (tomes Turow Cloncy 1 MNry King 4 Weep No Mon My lady Clark S Samm Rutherford 4 Legacy Michener 7 The Prince ot TWei Conroy The Haunted Miw L Amour 9 DM Oentty't Hottstte Detective ! Agency Adorns 10 Rne Thing Steel This Week 1 Ipycotcher Wnght The Closing oI the Amertcon Mind Bloom S The Croat Depression ot 1990 10 Batra Last Week Weeks On List 1 12 2 7 3 4 5 6 15 4 if e Ait in the Playing Maclaine 9 Love Medicine 9 Miracles Siegel 10 12 16 7 12 11 26 Lost Week Weeks On List 1 7 2 20 1 23 6 Cultural Literacy Hirsch 7 Straight On Tit Morning Lovell 9 Cali Me Anna Duke and Turan 9 Hummer Hammer 10 Lite ond Death in Shanghai 15 1 6 19 Cheng 11 4 2 43 1 Advice How-T- Miscellaneous This Lost Week 1 Weeks On List Webster's Ninth New Collegiate 105 2 The Cholesterol Cure Kowalski 9 How to Marry the Mon of Your Choice Ken! Diet tor Women 4 The Spodmk ond Gibbons 9 SibUngs Without fttvaky Fober ond Maftsh (Copynght) to a Georgia chain gang The home at 124 Bluestone Road on the outskirts of Cincinnati where Sethe and her children join Baby Suggs is at first a joyful community gathering place and way station on the Underground Railroad transportfreedom ing escaped In this vein Morrison makes it the s scene of a potluck supper celebrating the safe arrival of Sethe Later after the tragic death of Crawling-Already- ? Baby the author transforms 124 into a haunted house Beloved establishes an uncertain world in which spirits like slaveowners can be beneficent or malicious They can cause mischief and worse or warm a home with their generosity and grace The first spirit that comes to 124 Bluestone Road is playfully irritating but scary enough to force Sethe’s sons to leave home for good Once this spirit is banished another comes in the form of a with no place to call home Sleloved is her name and that is what she becomes for Sethe and Denver For Denver she is playmate for Sethe the daughter she lost years before When Paul D “the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry” shows up on Sethe’s doorstep and moves in after years of wandering on his own these relationships get tangled Accustomed to fending for herself Sethe has to learn to trust a man again Denver initially enlarged by Beloved's presence becomes overcome by jealousy as Beloved monopolizes her mother’s attentions Paul D loaves-and-fishe- child-woma- n survival Afro-Americ- an doesn’t know how to handle Beloved who wants his sexual pleasuring yet can't abide his taking Sethe away from her Beloved in short is both blessing and curse And only a kind of exorcism will render 124 Bluestone Road habitable again Like Morrison's previous novels and especially the acclaimed Song of Solomon Beloved is suffused with the supernatural Literary observers may wish to see n here the influence of the “magic realism” of Gabriel and many others hut in fact its genesis lies much closer to home m the folklore and oral traditions of black America Ju-j- u voodoo what have you this down-hom- e magic insinuates itself into the narrative at every turn Morrison’s lyrical incantatory style also owes a debt to the conventions of black storytelling and preaching Indeed it cries out to be read aloud Through sophisticated and rhythmical variations on traditional patterns it elicits reader participation It seduces us into believing what we might reject as unbelievable Here is a chain gang at work: “They d over the fields They sang the women they knew the children they had been They sang of bosses and masters and misses of mules and dogs and the snameless-nes- s Of pork in the woods of life meal in the pan fish on the line cane rain and rocking chairs" As the novel reaches its climax here is Sethe watching a host of women approaching her porch: “For Latin-Amer-ica- chain-dance- Sethe it was as though the c'paJ'in her where mother-in-la- all its preached) had come to her with heat and simmering leaves where the voices of women searched for the code right combination the key the the sound that broke the back of words Building voice upon voice until they found it and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in wash” its Morrison’s narrative strategy is to move her story along a bit at a time and then to leap back to those epochal events that changed her characters’ lives With each flashback they become symbolic markers Stations of the Cross demanding a measure of both reverence and horror: Sethe’s escape Denver’s birth the death of the baby Paul D’s escape from the chain gang With each return comes more knowledge of circumstance more revelation of character Even the extraordinary prose cannot hide Sethe’s weaknesses as a fictional creation She is plainly too much a monument Yes she possesses a mythic largeness — she seems the very personification of female dignity and strength — but unfortunately she sometimes also has a statue’s stiff- Toni Morrison Writes Fifth Novel Sethe’s white benefactors as abolitionists who “hated slavery more than they hated slaves” Many a Ph D has spent years in the archives to demonstrate that the abolitionists — altruists certainly but also captives of thinking — could be racists too As it was once said of DW Griffith’s classic yet racist film Birth of a Nation Beloved is history written in lightning With the emotional impact of few other books it forces us to see slavery and its aftermath from the inside from the slaves’ point of view But the book is of course not just history that rights historical wrongs but grand fiction that enlarges the spirit These survivors aren’t pitiable wretches they are worthy shapers of their own complicated bedeviled-by-histordestinies — Dan Cryer News-da- ness Sethe is not the terribly flawed yet altogether fascinating human being we respect and love in Morrison heroines as diverse as Pilate the wise ec- 19th-centur- y centric in Song of Solomon the vamp-isamoral Sula in the novel of the same name or Pecola the little black girl who would be white in “The Bluest Eye” Sethe is too much the representative black woman as stolid victor over suffering Nonetheless around her there swirls so much deeply felt life that the enormous power of the book as a whole cannot be denied Toni Morrison it should be added has obviously done her historical homework In a phrase she can sum up volumes Consider just one in which she describes the Bodwins h y y 'Man of the House’ speaks his mind Man Of The House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill by Thomas P O’Neill Jr with William Novak Random House 387 pp $1995 Congress has been with us now for very nearly 200 years but hardly anyone writes good books about it Insiders tend to tell us more than we want to know about motions to recommit and mythic figures like Uncle Joe Cannon Outsiders try to sidestep the sausage-factory aspects of legislating in favor of a Senate peopled with presidential candidates and a House full of political drudges It is therefore refreshing to report that the recently retired speaker of the House Tip O'Neill has done none of these things The Massachusetts Democrat has written an engaging account of his 34 years in the House of Representatives and his earlier political apprenticeship at home that manages to be accurate effortlessly informative and considerably less partisan than might have been expected from the chief punching bag of the early Reagan O’Neill makes no attempt to diguise his position on the political spectrum: he is that currently rare specimen an unabashed liberal Democrat who is not afraid of government helping the disadvantaged or of taxing those who are better off to provide such help He is Irish Roman Catholic and old enough to remember when both were the subject of social and political discrimination As a result the presidential sketches in Man of the House display more candor than party loyalty Eisenhower under whom he served during his first eight years in Congress receives little attention probably as a matter of courtesy Kennedy was “one of the great political leaders of our time” but was an indifferent representative and senator and had an ineffective congressional operation in the White House Lyndon Johnson was blunt vulgar and insensitive “but when it came to dealing with Congress he was the best I’ve ever seen” O'Neill has little flattering to say about Richard Nixon who was a match Gerald Ford told O'Neill he participant in a regular congressional poker game when he was vice president but had trouble re- membering the draw and complained when he lost Later during the Nixon administration the congressman said it occured to him that “any guy who hollers over a forty-dollpot has no business being president” Carter Jimmy was I’ve O’Neill writes “the smartest public official ever known” on issues but never understood how to work with Congress and brought a staff of “amateurs" into the White House The "worst” of the eight presidents he knew the former speaker says was Ronald Reagan “Most of the time he was an actor reading lines who didn’t understand his own programs” the author declares “I hate to say it about such an agreeable man but it was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became president” “But” says O’Neill “let me give him his due: he would have made a hell of a king” The O’Neill book is studded with small at a 1973 golf news-nugget- was through with politics and was on the verge of retiring — only a few weeks later Ford was appoint- ed vice president after Spiro resigned by late 1973 PresiAg--ne- dent Nixon was exhibiting “strange behavior” in the White" House and President Ford later-saihe had pardoned his predeces- - ( sor because he was “sick” O’Neill himself was “set up” for an Abs-cabribe offer according to an FBI employee but the plan acci- dentally fell through Man of the House is a long salty anecdotal conversation with the author that the reader hesitates to interrupt thanks no doubt to the skill of William Novak who also collaborated on such other biographical efforts as on Iacocca and The Mayflower Madam The context of the book is heavily weighted toward domestic politics at the expense of international affairs "But in all my years” O'Neill observes at one point “I have yet to meet a politician who was elected to anything on the basis of his foreign policy” — Warren Weaver Jr New York Times ’ Gershwin by George George and Ira Gershwin’s MY ONE AND ONLY Opens September 23 A happy hybrid of Gershwin songs It’s about an aviator a Channel swimmer and the America of the ’20s Featuring “’S Wonderful” “Strike Up the Band” “Nice Work If You Can Get It” “Funny Face” “How Long Has This Been Going On?” and "My One and Only” Season tickets still available Don’t miss HAMLET YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU A FLEA IN HER EAR THE DINING ROOM DEATH OF A SALESMAN SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN Call ’ 581-69- 61 Office open 10:00 am-- 6 :00 pm Monday-FridHigh school and group rates available American Express MasterCard and Visa accepted Box ay 581-56- Great artists Great theatre PIONEER Htheatre COMPANY 300 South and University |
