The Book That Made Me Put It Down Twice

A house that is haunted because it has to be

Here’s the setup, and I’ll keep it clean because this book deserves to unfold on you the way it unfolded on me. Sethe is a formerly enslaved woman living in Ohio in 1873 with her daughter Denver, in a house numbered 124 that is, matter of factly, haunted. Not haunted like a spooky effect. Haunted like a member of the household. The ghost throws things, leaves handprints, makes the dog limp. Sethe’s two sons ran off years ago because of it. Everyone in town gives the house a wide berth.

Then a woman calling herself Beloved shows up, young, strange, thirsty in a way that isn’t normal, and Sethe starts caring for her like something in her body recognizes this stranger before her mind does. I won’t spoil why. If you already know the history behind this book (it’s loosely inspired by the real case of Margaret Garner, a woman who killed her own child rather than let her be returned to slavery), you know roughly where this is going, and Morrison doesn’t hide the ball for suspense’s sake. She circles it. She gives you pieces out of order, a phrase here, an image there, until the full weight of what Sethe did and why lands on you sideways instead of head on. That structure is either going to feel like genius or like the book is jerking you around, and honestly, depending on the day, I’ve felt both.

The sentences are the whole show, and sometimes that’s a problem

Look, I want to talk about the prose first because it’s the reason this book is taught in every university on earth. Morrison writes like she’s carving. There’s a passage where Sethe describes her back, scarred from a whipping, as a chokecherry tree, branches and blossoms and all, and it is one of the most devastating images I have ever read because it takes something meant to be pure horror and makes you see it, briefly, as almost beautiful, before you remember what it actually is. That’s the trick of the whole novel. Morrison keeps finding the tenderness folded inside the atrocity, and it never once feels like she’s letting anyone off the hook for the atrocity itself.

Baby Suggs preaching in the Clearing, telling this traumatized congregation to love their flesh because nobody else is going to love it for them, is one of the great sermons in American fiction, religious or not. Paul D, arriving with his own catalog of horrors (the bit, the chain gang in Georgia, the box he was kept in that he calls his tobacco tin heart) gives the book its other emotional spine, a man trying to figure out if he’s allowed to want anything after slavery taught him not to. When he and Sethe finally reckon with what happened in the shed, it’s one of the most quietly devastating scenes in the book, no fireworks, just two people staring at an unbearable fact together.

Now here’s my heresy, and I’ve made peace with it. The middle third, when Beloved’s presence starts consuming the house and Denver and Sethe both start dissolving into her, the prose gets so incantatory and repetitive that I lost the thread more than once. There are passages, the ones that shift into Beloved’s own broken, almost prelinguistic voice, that read to me as brilliant on a technical level and genuinely difficult to just sit and read for pleasure. I’ve talked to smart readers who say that section is where the book becomes transcendent. I’ve talked to equally smart readers who say it’s where they gave up. I think both camps are right, which is an annoying thing to admit in a review, but there it is.

I read most of my third attempt at this book on a red eye flight, overtired, half the cabin asleep, and I remember hitting the scene where the full truth of what happened in the shed gets laid out plainly and just sitting there with the book in my lap for a solid five minutes, not able to read the next line, staring at the seatback in front of me. That doesn’t happen to me with books very often anymore. It happened here.

“Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

About Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was a former editor at Random House before she was a famous novelist, which I think about a lot, because you can feel an editor’s ruthlessness in how tightly these sentences are wound even when the structure is loose. She wrote nine novels, won the Pulitzer for this one, and became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was also, by every account, funny and sharp and impatient with anyone who wanted to simplify her work into a lesson. She once said she wrote the kind of books she wanted to read and that didn’t yet exist. Beloved is the clearest proof of that instinct paying off.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, for more of her mythic, generational storytelling with a slightly gentler entry point
• The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates, for a novel clearly in conversation with Beloved’s blend of memory, slavery, and the supernatural
• Kindred by Octavia Butler, if you want the time travel version of reckoning with this history, more plot forward, still gutting
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones, for a wider historical canvas of the same era with prose almost as dense

If you want a copy to actually sit with and underline, here’s Beloved on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Is Beloved a literal ghost, a trauma made flesh, a real missing woman, or all three at once, and does the novel want you to settle that question?
2. Why do you think Morrison chooses to reveal Sethe’s central act in fragments rather than telling it to us plainly from the start?
3. What did you make of Baby Suggs’s sermon in the Clearing, and why does her faith curdle by the end of her life?
4. Paul D’s “tobacco tin heart” versus Sethe’s chokecherry tree scar: what do these two central images say about how trauma gets carried in the body?
5. Did the ending feel earned to you, or too abrupt after everything the novel put you through?