Love

February 2, 2004
More a tapestry than a novel, Morrison's newest weaves the past into the present using perspectives as threads and voices as color. The author's soft voice forces listeners to pay close attention; even so, the novel's complex construction, coupled with her hushed tones, will have listeners reaching for "rewind" to capture the subtle details so important in Morrison's compositions. This audiobook is best suited for those prepared to concentrate closely and wait patiently as layer builds upon layer. The story opens in the 1930s on the Florida coast when L, who narrates the story from beyond the grave, sees Cosey holding his wife, Julia, in the ocean; L feels such waves of tenderness radiating off him that she signs on to his life forever and becomes both maid and chef at his hotel. The novel winds through the lives of Cosey's other women, including his granddaughter Christine and her best friend, Heed the Night Johnson. Cosey twirls them all around his little finger, abruptly and unapologetically marrying the 12-year-old Heed. Thread by thread, the novel builds as Cosey's women glitter around him, even after his death. Morrison leaves readers with the powerful realization: neither good nor evil, Cosey was simply a man. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Forecasts, Sept. 1, 2003).

Starred review from September 1, 2003
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. (Oct. 28)Forecast:Morrison's measured pace—she produces a new novel every five years or so—does much to build reader anticipation. A full slate of media appearances (Today, Charlie Rose, NPR, etc.) and an 11-city tour will further whet appetites for her latest, which will be released in a first printing of 500,000.

June 1, 2003
The Nobel prize winner writes about love-specifically, the love of a half-dozen women for wealthy Bill Cosey and his love for an elusive woman from his past.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2003
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2003
When gorgeous and amoral Junior arrives in the Southern coastal town of Silk, chance brings her to a deadly crossroads. She talks herself into a job at the center of a love/hate feud between two elderly women, the remaining members of a clan who once defined Silk's African American elite. The tension involves the late Bill "Papa" Cosey and the riches he achieved during his heyday in the 1940s and 1950s as proprietor of a fabulous resort. Along the way, he obtained the intense love of many women, including granddaughter Christine, lower-class child bride Heed, and spectacular "sporting woman" Celestial. Eight compact chapters named for aspects of Cosey's character ("Benefactor," "Lover," "Guardian," and so on) present the shifting perspectives of those entranced by this charismatic, secretive man long after his death. Nobel Laureate Morrison's latest is a vividly narrated exploration of the pleasures, burdens, and distortions of obsessive devotion. Given the book's brevity, the dialog must carry the story convincingly-and, of course, Morrison is a master at this. Certainly, this book won't disappoint readers already familiar with Morrison and will serve as a good introduction for those new to her. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/03.]-Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.