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Toni Morrison's "Paradise"

© Robert Powers

When Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, it forever sealed her reputation as a great writer. Nobel Prizes aren't handed to mediocre writers. But not all who win this most prestigious honor are necessarily acclaimed by the public.

Americans have no special finesse victors with the Nobel judges, either. Before Morrison's win, the last previous American writer honored was Isaac Bashevis Singer, in 1978. Saul Bellow won in 1976, while John Steinbeck took home the prize in 1962. Ernest Hemingway received his in 1954. Other American winners include Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner, Pearl S. Buck (the first woman to win), and Sinclair Lewis. That's nine Yanks since 1901. Morrison's inclusion caused a bit of controversy. Her first novel since the Nobel is the just published "Paradise" (Alfred A. Knopf, $25). Its critical reception has been mostly laudatory, with a few exceptions, most notably the acerbic Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times. Calling the novel "contrived," she labeled this wonderful book "an earthbound hodgepodge, devoid of both urgency and narrative sleight of hand .. . . (T)he novel's one surreal set-piece feels like a hasty afterthought, clumsily grafted on to try to kick the story to another level." To Ms. Kakutani, who has assaulted the books of many esteemed authors, sees "Paradise" as "a contrived, formulaic book that mechanically pits men against women, old against young, the past against the present."

Times editors, however, published a contradicting review in the Sunday Book Review, by critic Brooke Allen, who deemed "Paradise" "probably her best work of fiction to date." What did Bob Powers think about Morrison's latest? I was afraid you'd ask. I blush as I type these lines. I find Morrison's new work both delicious and overwhelming, and not in the best sense of either word.

Although there are brief accounts in these pages that display Morrison's huge talents, overall this novel mumbles along as if its author sought to make it difficult. She switches settings abruptly. She creates characters so imprecisely that this reader had problems sorting them out. The story wanders across a century, most action occurring in a small Oklahoma town in 1976. That town, Ruby, consists almost entirely of blacks. Morrison points out that separation of the races doesn't work, that people can be evil no matter their color or the influence of other races.

The book opens with a stunning piece of writing that depicts a raid

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