Toni Morrison’s new novel challenges the assumption that writers lose their mojo once they reach a great age. Morrison, now in her ninth decade, did not start publishing novels until she was nearly 40 but proves with God Help the Child that her writing is still as fresh, adventurous and vigorous as ever.
There is also the sense of a circle being completed with this new work because Morrison’s very first novel shares its two main thematic preoccupations of child abuse and shadism, the inter-black prejudice against darker skin tones that is rarely given a public airing. In The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, a very dark-skinned black girl called Pecola, considered ugly by everyone, is raped by her father. In God Help the Child, the protagonist, Lula Ann, is born to a lighter-skinned mother and father who have enjoyed the relative privilege their skin colour affords them in America.
Both are appalled at the “terrible” darkness of their newborn daughter, to the extent that the mother declares: “She was so black she scared me.” She contemplates infanticide and when the father abandons the family, she is left to raise Lula Ann on her own. Depriving her daughter of all private and public affection, she insists Lula Ann call her “Sweetness”, not “Mother”, so as not to confuse people, she reasons.
In this novel of unreliable narrators, Sweetness is the first and least likable. Reflecting on how she raised her daughter becomes an exercise in self-justification that exposes her deeply ingrained shadism.
Unsurprisingly, Lula Ann grows up feeling unloved. She is also a witness to an unforgettable act of child abuse in her neighbourhood that continues to haunt her. We meet her as a young adult, alienated from her mother, reinventing herself with the new name of Bride and holding down a great job as regional manager for a successful cosmetics company.
However, unlike Pecola, born two generations earlier, Lula Ann is of an age where her darkness, deliberately offset with stylish white clothes, is now considered exotically beautiful. But the truth is that she has been deeply damaged by her upbringing and through her story we encounter other damaged people who, it eventually transpires, are also living in the shadow of some kind of child abuse. Whether perpetrator, victim or both, each one has to come to terms with the trauma of the past in order to get on with their lives. This could mean forgiveness or it might mean atonement.
The plot, as such, in this novel of interlinked sections, hinges on Lula Ann’s pursuit of Booker, the man she loved but who has recently left her without notice or explanation. She goes on a journey to find him and ends up going awol in the outback with hippies, where she seems to lose touch with reality and have a nervous breakdown.
Morrison’s characters are always complex and sometimes the reader has to join up the dots.
In this short but emotionally charged work, there is a clear disjunction between how they view themselves and how other characters’ experience them. Multiple perspectives show us that Lula Ann might appear to be a victim but she is almost pathologically self-obsessed and is weighed down with guilt at a shameful secret.
Her mother might convince herself that she was being cruel to be kind to her daughter as a child, but she doesn’t convince us. Brooklyn might appear to be Lula Ann’s best friend, but is she really? And Booker, the wandering lover, appears to be a low-life scrounger, but we discover he is much more than that.
Morrison’s characteristically deft temporal shifts and precisely honed language deliver literary riches galore. And while this novel is very readable, the pleasure is in working for its deeper rewards.
God Help the Child is published by Chatto & Windus (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £11.99
