Several voices, several lives, all caught up in a drama of sorts caused by the impact one man had on the women he knew.
They worked for him, they slept with him, he let them down by dying and now they lament him, after a fashion. Love is the wrong title for this unconvincing, operatic melodrama, Toni Morrison's eighth and most insignificant performance to date in a career in which the sheer physicality of her rich, lyric, spoken prose has often carried her further than her ideas alone would have.
A young girl arrives at a house, drawn by an advertisement. The first woman discourages the newcomer; she certainly does not want anyone sharing the hostile world she inhabits with the widow of her grandfather. But don't be fooled, the pair are not divided by years. The man's granddaughter is actually older than his widow; after all, he married her when she was 11 years old.
This is a book about angry sex, sex as barter and sex as war. Aside from that, it is a study in old hatreds. But Morrison, the 1993 Nobel literature laureate and author of Beloved (1988), a novel that quickly became central in the telling of the story of black experience, never loses sight of that theme, her people adrift in a place called the US. Even her finest novel, Jazz, an elegy that begins with a man's murder of the girl for whom he holds a dangerous, scary passion, says far more about the US black experience than it does about a tragic crime of passion.
Her most recent book, Paradise, continued to pursue that theme of wild passion but also developed it further in a darker and more sinister exposé of racism and the fear vulnerable outsiders can inspire in the wanton and the cruel. In that novel, Morrison's lush prose began to show signs of overpowering her storytelling. Her sense of the dramatic appeared to be moving towards the theatrical. In Love, the crude, disjointed narrative heaves with incantatory passages of whispered horrors so outrageous as to become comical. The characters are cloud puffs of nothing; all are mere ciphers. The lesson to hand is the evils of sex, its abusive power and potential to destroy emotions and loyalties.
None of the characters - absent parents, wayward children, deadly rivals - acquire any substance. Morrison, here more puppet-master than storyteller, approaches each of them in the context of sex and their responses to its meaning. The young girl looking for the job is assessed as a pair of legs in a short skirt. To an older woman, she is a rival for the beauty the woman once had and believes at its best would have overshadowed that of the girl. The girl in turn recruits a young boy, all of 14 years, as her partner in robust coupling.
As ever with Morrison there are layers of history and stories within stories. The problem is that this time, none of them mean anything. It is a book of bitter exchanges, crazy happenings and false relationships. This is not about black America, it is about the odd things people do to each other, the humiliations they inflict, the resentments that fester beyond time:
"She's not my friend. She's my grandmother."
"Say what?"
"You heard me. Grandmother. Get it?"
"But you're the same age."
"I'm older. Eight months older."
"Wait a minute." Junior frowned. "She said she was married for thirty years and he died twenty-five years ago. So she must have been . . . a baby."
"Mention was made." Christine sipped from the can.
"And you were . . . how old?"
"Twelve. My grandfather married her when she was eleven. We were best friends. One day we built castles on the beach; next day he sat her in his lap."
There has always been a spoken dimension to Morrison's prose. It can read well on the page, but is enhanced by its author's rich tones in performance. The oral is her theatre; as a writer, she gives the impression of passing on tales. She is a Delphic witness to moments of national and private grief. Beloved, with its ghosts populating the darkest chapter of US history, that of slavery, is an epic; Jazz is a lament for a lost world as much as a story of doomed, forbidden love.
But this new book even fails as a study of twisted relationships. It is interesting to see that a novel shaped by the anger of its characters can prove so emotionally bereft. None of the stories lives; instead, they are static. Morrison's famously rhythmic voice-prose becomes a droning litany of wrongs perpetrated in the name of want and need, hatred and anger, but never love. Instead of epic woes, there is only the scandal of lazy gossip. If there is a ruling presence in this pretentiously dramatic yarn it is that of Bill Cosey, the dead man who made and unmade lives.
Corrupter or well-intentioned madman, or probably both, he never develops into anything of substance. Why? Because of the multiple ambiguities that oppress an unconvincing novel that appears not to have fully engaged Morrison. The impression is of a struggle to invest meaning in words and phrases cobbled together in an emptily stylistic performance that quickly slides out of the reader's mind and memory.
Toni Morrison has previously made bold gestures and told her story in the opening line and then created a world. On this occasion she presents shocking instances in the guise of truths - and fails.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times Fiction
Love By Toni Morrison Chatto, 202pp. £16.99
