[In the following review, McDowell discusses the theme of love in Morrison's Love.]

What is this thing called love that cannot stand alone, but depends on modifiers and conjunctions to complete it, to give it heft and meaning? There is “brotherly” love, “platonic” love, “puppy” love, “courtly” love, and of course, that most vexing, confounding, ever-elusive “romantic” love. Love often shows up in common parlance with a partner, as in love and death, love and lust, love and hate, love and war, and that reverent, consecrated pairing, love and marriage, which “go together like a horse and carriage,” in the words of the popular ditty ending with the rhyming couplet, “This I tell you brother, you can't have one without the other.” We know, of course, that we can and more often do have one without the other: marriage without love and, conversely, love without marriage. A loveless marriage, sullied from the start, is the mainspring of Toni Morrison's latest novel, Love, a marriage between the 52-year-old Bill Cosey (his second) and his 11-year-old child bride, Heed the Night, whom Cosey purchases from her father for ＄200 and a pocketbook.

You can guess you're in a Toni Morrison novel when you encounter such a situation, not to mention a character named Heed the Night, whose relatives are named Solitude, Righteous Morning, Winsome, and Joy. Reading on, you find that Heed has hired a young sex-pot and reform school parolee named Junior, whose toes have merged together to form a hoof (Pan perhaps?); by then you know for certain that you have landed on Morrison's narrative planet, populated by the outcast and dismembered, the uncanny and grotesque. When Junior appears, wearing no underwear, answering Heed's ad for a secretary and companion, Cosey has been long dead, leaving behind his next of kin: Heed, his widow, and Christine, his granddaughter, who were once intimate childhood friends. Eight months older than her former playmate cum bride cum grandmother, Christine is sent away following the marriage, exiled from the house “throbbing with girl flesh made sexy.” After Cosey's death, she returns to Silk, the coastal town where Cosey had established “the best and best-known vacation spot for colored folk on the East Coast.” Like a character in a Greek tragedy, she is determined to exact her revenge on Heed, the woman who displaced her in her grandfather's favor and affection; but more, to assert her “claim of blood” on Cosey's estate, “equal to Heed's claim as widow.”

Encamped in separate quarters in the three-story house that Cosey built at One Monarch Street, Heed and Christine engage in pitched battles, “bruising fights with hands, feet, teeth and soaring objects,” before settling into an “unnegotiated cease-fire.” Nearly as famous a residence as Beloved's 124 Bluestone Road, Cosey's imposing house, resembling a church, harbors several ghosts of its own, perhaps none more haunting than the ghost of Cosey.

Just who was this Bill Cosey? What motivated him to marry a girl almost 50 years his junior? What manner of man was he, who had “women fighting so hard for his attention you'd think he was a preacher”? While the entire cast of female characters seems obsessed with Cosey—May, his daughter-in-law; Vida, the former receptionist at his resort; L, its former cook and the narrator; and Junior, the randy secretary—the novel revolves around Heed and Christine, these two friends turned mortal enemies, who have squandered their lives (and their friendship) nursing and rehearsing grudges and resentments decades old. As with all of Morrison's narratives, the reader will have to wrestle with this book, which is not brought easily to heel. Like her previous novels, this one is elliptical and slow to give away its secrets and then, at that, in jagged pieces. We come to know Cosey and his women shard by shard.

A “handsome giant,” a “heavy drinker,” and a committed womanizer, whose “pleasure was in pleasing,” Cosey is descended from a “long line of quiet prosperous slaves and thrifty freedmen.” Rumored like his father to be a police informant, he is deemed nonetheless the “county's role model,” whose blood-soaked money financed Cosey's Hotel and Resort, now boarded up and much of its surrounding acreage sold in parcels to developers who throw up slapdash houses that blight the town of Oceanside. The awe and envy of the townspeople eking out a hardscrabble existence at a fish cannery, Cosey's resort “lived on even after the hotel was dependent for its life on the [local blacks] it once excluded” from its doors.

But even when we learn these surface details, Cosey remains much the mystery man, who takes shape and texture from what each person needs and finds in his portrait, which once hung behind the hotel's reception desk, and now above Heed's bed, “Painted from a snapshot,” the portrait is gilded by each viewer, spun from the filaments of fantasy. For Heed, the image is “exactly like” the man. “What you see there is a wonderful man,” she tells Junior, who has already found in Cosey's portrait the man she needs to see: both the father and the “Good Man” she never had. His “kind eyes … promised to hold [her] steady on his shoulders,” through “an orchard of green Granny apples heavy and thick on the boughs.”

This vision of paradise and plenitude embodied in a person is bound to be shattered, especially since, in this book, Cosey, the love object, the beau ideal, is himself so shattered—“an ordinary man” with “cracked-glass eyes” who has been “ripped … by wrath and love.”

Cosey isn't the only character “ripped” by love in this novel, in which acts of violence, present and remembered, are much the norm. A girl named Pretty Fay is gang raped; Junior's uncles chase her in a truck, seemingly for sport, running her over and crushing her toes. Heed sets Christine's bed on fire, and Christine shows up at Cosey's funeral with a switchblade in her hand. But perhaps the quintessential act of violence is Cosey's marriage to Heed, which “laid the brickwork for [his] ruination” and hers, as well—all because he wanted to replace the son he'd lost, and for that “only an unused girl would do.” No child issues from the marriage and Cosey—“the dirty one who introduced [Heed] to nasty,” to the reek of “liquor and an old man's business”—sees the error of his ways and returns to his long-time lover, the mysterious Celestial, a “sporting woman,” whose “face [is] cut from cheek to ear.”

One might reasonably wonder why there is so much violence in a book called Love, why violence repeatedly usurps the space that love might hold. Commonly the fantasied antidote to psychic wounds and losses, real and imagined, love is an expected unguent, a form of medication, pain's “natural” anodyne. But Morrison takes a harsher, tougher, less romantic view of love, one fashioned from the accumulated wisdom of the ages, a wisdom infused throughout her novels. While this novel must be seen on its own terms, of course, it is also useful to place it in the context of Morrison's earlier work.

In Love she reprises her most familiar scenes and situations of love gone badly wrong, twisted and distorted into surrealistic shapes, often bizarre beyond belief. One thinks of the possessive/protective love that compels Sethe to kill her baby girl, Beloved, in an effort to spare her the certain social death of slavery; the obsessive love that leads Joe Trace, the older man, to fatally shoot Dorcas, his younger lover (Jazz); the God-like love that compels Eva to burn her drug-addicted son alive, or the self-sacrificing love that drives her to hurl her crippled body from a top-floor window in a futile effort to save her daughter engulfed in flames (Sula). But Morrison's exploration, from book to book, of love in all its guises began, significantly, with the love of whiteness as physical ideal. Pecola's tragic, ultimately maddening, yearning for blond hair and blue eyes in The Bluest Eye set the template in many ways for the work that followed. Indeed, Morrison's poignant, finely wrought dramatization of Pecola's ardent desire for the “look of love” (at least in the Western world) is underneath it all, a desire to be loved, noticed, recognized. It is in The Bluest Eye that Morrison condemns the idealization of “physical beauty,” along with its counterpart, “romantic love,” the two “most destructive ideas in the history of human thought,” she writes. Her first novel's penultimate paragraph could serve as an epigraph to the latest:

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly … The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye.

As the heart's desire of Love, Bill Cosey is literally frozen in the glare of his lovers' inward eyes—Heed's, Christine's, Junior's, Vida's, L's, and May's—becoming whatever each needs him to be: “Friend,” “Stranger,” “Benefactor,” “Lover,” “Husband,” “Guardian,” “Father,” the roles that double as the chapter titles, the last of which is, tellingly, “Phantom.”

Love is ultimately abstract in its treatment, more philosophy of love than its expression. But if this seems the least emotionally felt, the least passionately surcharged of Morrison's novels, it is perhaps because her aim is not to write a love story, at least as that genre is conventionally understood, with expectations of sweaty palms and lustful scenes of romance required or renewed. Love's terms here are far from “cozy.” There are no bedroom scenes of couples like Violet/Violent and Joe Trace lying underneath the covers in the dark, whispering to each other what is in their hearts, tenderly exploring each other's bodies; no Sula mounting her lover, looking into his “golden eyes and the velvet helmet of [his] hair, rocking, swaying” to the “creeping disorder that was flooding her hips”; no First Corinthians “tilt[ing] [her lover's] chin up with her fingers and plant[ing] a feathery kiss on his throat.” Despite all of Cosey's rumored lovers, his “pleasure in pleasing,” there are few descriptions of pleasure in this text, except perhaps for Junior's trysts with Romen, the 16-year-old male Heed hires as yardman and errand boy.

What can we really ever know of love, the novel seems implicitly to ask, especially since so many other things come masquerading in its name: greed, obsession, betrayal, possessiveness, jealousy, envy, and above all love's impostor, sex, “the clown of love.” According to this novel's mysterious narrator, who prizes secrecy, sex stands, much the same as violence, in the place where love might be. Women especially “open their legs rather than their hearts,” which hide the wounded “sugar child, the winsome baby girl curled up somewhere inside,” playing in their minds their own versions of a somebody-done-somebody-wrong song that another's wished-for body will set all to right. Because both Christine and Heed each cast the other as the wronging partner in her life's drama, “Big Daddy” Cosey, the leading man, gets off scot-free. As the novel moves, perhaps too hastily, to its conclusion. Heed and Christine arrive at the mutual realization that Cosey was indeed an illusion, “everywhere and nowhere,” that each had “made him up.” But they reach the greater realization that they “could have been living [their] lives hand in hand instead of looking for Big Daddy everywhere.” In seeking to “possess” Cosey and then his material legacy, these former friends forget they once “belonged” to the other, “shar[ing] stomachache laughter, a secret language, and knew, as they slept together that one's dreaming was the same as the other one's.”

This language is reminiscent of Sula's deathbed memory of the days when she and Nel were “girls together,” so close that they merged to form “two throats … one eye and … had no price.” Morrison here reprises that earlier novel's exploration of how women turn into rivals and competitors for men (more boys than men), whose affections are always splintered, divided, far-flung. According to the narrator in Love, “Having men meant sharing them,” although every lover typically wants “the largest slice,” unwilling if not ill-prepared to “know the real” love, “the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that.” Few of Morrison's characters seem endowed with such intelligence, their lives and choices attesting to the far more common reality that love and intelligence are mutually exclusive. We tend to love first and think later, if at all.

If Morrison ultimately offers a more sobering, cold-eyed view of love than one might hope to find in a novel titled Love, she has blown a kiss, as it were, to her most ardent readers, has tendered a kind of valentine—a retrospective or compendium of her earlier takes on love. The distance between the first words proper of The Bluest Eye (1970)—“Quiet as its kept”—and those of this new novel—“the women's legs are spread wide open”—represents not merely a chronological sweep but a philosophical journey into the heart of love, at times a darkened continent blazed by Morrison's luminescent prose, her dazzling lyricism, her labor of love.