Love (Hardcover)

by Toni Morrison (Author) "The day she walked the streets of Silk, a chafing wind kept the temperature low and the sun was helpless to move outdoor thermometers more..." (more)
Key Phrases: Bill Cosey, Billy Boy, Monarch Street (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (October 28, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375409440
• ISBN-13: 978-0375409448
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (97 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #429,822 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, but accomplished all the same, January 13, 2004

By	Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Toni Morrison's fiction has justifiably been heralded as some of the best existing within contemporary literature. In her newest novel, LOVE, Morrison weaves a simpler and more easily followed story than she did in PARADISE. Set in Up Beach, a dying resort town that once attracted the finest jazz musicians and their upper class followers, Morrison creates a tale of failed lives and dreams. Hotel owner Bill Cosey was powerful in life, and is even more powerful in death, as his mistakes and decisions live on in those who survived him and even in those who never knew him.

The writing is elegantly exact, though I would expect nothing less from Morrison, but, in the voice of L, the italicized voice framing the novel, can become overly grand. At times, I couldn't help hearing the voice of Della Reese in "Touched By An Angel," the preachy, sentimental television show of a while back. Still, this novel is engrossing and surprisingly accessible. Until the second half, when Morrison fails to bring together the narratives into a powerful and convincing whole, this novel promised to be one of Morrison's best.

Part of my disappointment in this book comes from my expectations; Morrison is truly one of America's finest writers, and I had hoped to discover another literary tour de force. Instead, this novel feels small, not because of its relatively short length but because Morrison fails to take the reader beyond the specifics of her characters' lives. Even worse, the ending is neat, and somewhat forced, something I never would have expected from Morrison.

Despite the novel's failings, it is still better than much of what is being published today. You won't find Morrison's masterpiece in LOVE, but you will find skilled writing and an often compelling story. Better than PARADISE but not nearly as accomplished as BELOVED, this novel is middling Morrison, something most other writers can only dream of accomplishing.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely Lovely, November 4, 2003

By	Maurice Williams "mauricewms" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I can never really put my finger on it but whenever I've finished a Morrison novel, I'm left nursing a range of emotions from awe to despair. I'm left pondering what the book was all about, which forces me to exam more closely the themes, characters, and conflicts of the novel. The end result of this closer examination is always a better understanding of self and a richer appreciation for others.

In Morrison's latest novel, the author examines the consequences of perhaps the most sought after emotion in human existence. Love, and its various faces - hate lust, envy - is set during the 1950's in an ocean side town where Bill Cosey owns a resort that caters to middle and upper class blacks. Heed, Christine and May are the primary characters. L, a narrating spirit and former employee of the resort, provides background and insight into the other characters motives in a voice that resonates with truth and love. Heed and Christine share a pure unconditional love that bonds the two in friendship until Bill, Christine's grandfather, takes Heed as his bride. Bill, at age 52, purchases the 11-year-old Heed from her parents in hopes of obtaining a pure and virginal vessel to bear him a son to replace the one he lost to death. May, Christine's mother, sees Heed as a threat to the family's upper-class lifestyle and does everything in her power to disgrace the child bride. The love once shared by Heed and Christine is quickly turned into a life consuming hatred as May enlists Christine in her campaign against Heed.

Morrison unleashes, with grace and assurance, the literary skills she has cultivated over the course of her career. She is a master at telling a story from the inside out. Love, with wonderfully drawn characters and imagistic prose that nearly leaps from the page, is a splendid compliment to the author's literary canon. The novel is thin but deep. The only thing better than reading a Morrison novel is having a few people to discuss it with. Curl up and enjoy!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simple title. Complex book, November 18, 2003

By	Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Toni Morrison is without peer; and she just keeps getting better and better. In Love (have you EVER heard a more audacious title?), Morrison crafts a rich and dense novel that illuminates the full spectrum of desire. Bill Cosey, a charismatic dude if ever there was one, ran a ritzy seaside resort for African Americans in the wild and wooly 40s and 50s. But now he's dead, and the story becomes a portrait of his power, unusual for black men of his times, and its effect on those who came after him.
Women. Oh, where would this story be without women? In Bill's wake, the women of his life vie for position, scrabbling over the will he wrote eons ago on a throw-away menu.
If you love Toni Morrison's rich writing style, you won't be disappointed, but you might want to keep a pen and pad of paper handy to keep track of the loooong list of characters.