Book Description

Toni Morrison's new novel is a Faulknerian symphony of passion and hatred, power and perversity, color and class that spans three generations of black women in a fading beach town.

In life, Bill Cosey enjoyed the affections of many women, who would do almost anything to gain his favor. In death his hold on them may be even stronger. Wife, daughter, granddaughter, employee, mistress: As Morrison's protagonists stake their furious claim on Cosey's memory and estate, using everything from intrigue to outright violence, she creates a work that is shrewd, funny, erotic, and heart-wrenching.

Amazon.com

The first page of Toni Morrison's novel Love is a soft introduction to a narrator who pulls you in with her version of a tale of the ocean-side community of Up Beach, a once popular ocean resort. Morrison introduces an enclave of people who react to one man--Bill Cosey--and to each other as they tell of his affect on generations of characters living in the seaside community. One clear truth here, told time and again, is how folks love and hate each other and the myriad ways it's manifested; these versions of humanity are seen in almost every line. Monsters and ghosts creep into young girls' dreams and around corners and then return to staid ladies' lives as they age and remember friendships and cold battles. Men and women--Heed, Romen, Junior, Christine, Celestial, and the rest of Morrison's cast--cry and sing out their weaknesses and strengths in rotating perspectives. Sandler, a Cosey employee, is a brilliant agent of Morrison's descriptions of human behavior, "Then, in a sudden shift of subject that children and heavy drinkers enjoy, 'My son, Billy was about your age. When he died, I mean.'" And Romen is allowed to play hero by saving a young girl from a brutal gang rape, while at the same time, he battles disgust like no superhuman would be caught dead feeling.

Though slim in pages, Morrison constructs Love with a precision and elegance that shows her characters' flaws and fears with brutal accuracy. Love may be less complex than others in the grand Morrison oeuvre, but not because Morrison performs literary hand-holding. Readers will experience in this smooth, sharp-eyed gem another instance of the Toni Morrison craftsmanship: she enters your mind, hangs a tale or two there, and leaves just as quietly as she came.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--E. Brooke Gilbert

From Publishers Weekly

At the center of this haunting, slender eighth novel by Nobel winner Morrison is the late Bill Cosey-entrepreneur, patriarch, revered owner of the glorious Cosey Hotel and Resort (once "the best and best-known vacation spot for colored folk on the East Coast") and captivating ladies' man. When the novel opens, the resort has long been closed, and Cosey's mansion shelters only two feuding women, his widow, Heed, and his granddaughter, Christine. Then sly Junior Viviane, fresh out of "Reform, then Prison," answers the ad Heed placed for a companion and secretary, and sets the novel's present action-which is secondary to the rich past-in motion. "Rigid vipers," Vida Gibbons calls the Cosey women; formerly employed at the Cosey resort, Vida remembers only its grandeur and the benevolence of its owner, though her husband, Sandler, knew the darker side of Vida's idol. As Heed and Christine feud ("Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy: it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself"), Junior of the "sci-fi eyes" vigorously seduces Vida and Sandler's teenage grandson. In lyrical flashbacks, Morrison slowly, teasingly reveals the glories and horrors of the past-Cosey's suspicious death, the provenance of his money, the vicious fight over his coffin, his disputed will. Even more carefully, she unveils the women in Cosey's life: his daughter-in-law, May, whose fear that civil rights would destroy everything they had worked for drove her to kleptomania and insanity; May's daughter, Christine, who spent hard years away from the paradise of the hotel; impoverished Heed the Night Johnson, who became Cosey's very young "wifelet"; the mysterious "sporting woman" Celestial; and L, the wise and quiet former hotel chef, whose first-person narration weaves throughout the novel, summarizing and appraising lives and hearts. Morrison has crafted a gorgeous, stately novel whose mysteries are gradually unearthed, while Cosey, its axis, a man "ripped, like the rest of us, by wrath and love," remains deliberately in shadow, even as his family burns brightly, terribly around him.

From Booklist

Despite the simplicity of its title, Love is a profound novel. A Nobel laureate must feel considerable pressure to keep performing on a higher level than other writers. With her latest novel, Morrison slaps our face with the fact that she is better than most. The book has the tone of an elegy, for it emerges as a remembrance of and yearning for past times and past people in a black seaside community. There were days, back in the 1940s and 1950s, when the Cosey Hotel and Resort was the place for blacks to vacation, dance, and dine. Bill Cosey, a charismatic figure greatly attractive to women, ran the resort. But now Bill is dead, and the story is, as we see, not only a paean to past good times but also a portrait of Bill Cosey's power. Unusual for blacks at the time, Bill did enjoy power, both economic and social, for as far as the boundaries of his coastal town reached--his kingdom by the sea. Now, in his absence, the women in his life jockey for their own power in the vacuum he left behind; their world now revolves around his will, scribbled many years ago on a dirty menu. The novel's section headings tell the tale of the different roles Bill played in these women's lives: friend, benefactor, lover, and husband, among others. At least in her later novels, Morrison can stand to be criticized for obscurantism, which is also the case, to a certain degree, here; in fact, readers may want to compose a chart as they read, to keep characters and their relationships to each other straight. But as a vivid painter of human emotions, Morrison is without peer, her impressions rendered in an exquisitely metaphoric but comfortably open style.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Brad Hooper

From AudioFile

Bill Cosey's male magnetism attracts the women who inhabit Morrison's pages. Some commanding, some flighty, all are drawn to Cosey's passion. Once, Cosey's Hotel and Resort on the beach was the place for "colored folk on the East Coast." Now, the run-down structure is home to his contentious widow and granddaughter. Through a series of retrospectives, the mystery of the questionable circumstances surrounding Cosey's death and his role in each woman's life gradually unfolds. Morrison confronts issues of race in America, particularly the deep disappointment of many African-Americans in the face of ineffectual civil rights legislation. Aching with melancholy for another, better, time, a time left in a troubled past, Morrison's novel combines elegance of language with a lush, luxurious reading to make "must listening." S.J.H. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award

Book Dimension

length: (cm)20.1 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)13.2