Oprah Book Club® Selection, January 1998: Toni Morrison's Paradise takes place in the tiny farming community of Ruby, Oklahoma, which its residents proudly proclaim "the one all-black town worth the pain." Settled by nine African American clans during the 1940s, the town represents a small miracle of self-reliance and community spirit. Readers might be forgiven, in fact, for assuming that Morrison's title refers to Ruby itself, which even during the 1970s retains an atmosphere of neighborliness and small-town virtue. Yet Paradises are not so easily gained. As we soon discover, Ruby is fissured by ancestral feuds and financial squabbles, not to mention the political ferment of the era, which has managed to pierce the town's pious isolation. In the view of its leading citizens, these troubles call for a scapegoat. And one readily exists: the Convent, an abandoned mansion not far from town--or, more precisely, the four women who occupy it, and whose unattached and unconventional status makes them the perfect targets for patriarchal ire. ("Before those heifers came to town," the men complain, "this was a peaceable kingdom.") One July morning, then, an armed posse sets out from Ruby for a round of ethical cleansing. Paradise actually begins with the arrival of these vigilantes, only to launch into an intricate series of flashbacks and interlaced stories. The cast is large--indeed, it seems as though we must have met all 360 members of Ruby's populace--and Morrison knows how to imprint even the minor players on our brains. Even more amazing, though, are the full-length portraits she draws of the four Convent dwellers and their executioners: rich, rounded, and almost painful in their intimacy. This richness--of language and, ultimately, of human understanding--combats the aura of saintliness that can occasionally mar Morrison's fiction. It also makes for a spectacular piece of storytelling, in which such biblical concepts as redemption and divine love are no postmodern playthings but matters of life and (in the very first sentence, alas) death.


From Library Journal
It's the 1970s, and four young women living in a convent near an all-black town have been viciously attacked. This is Morrison's first novel since winning the Nobel prize, and by the time she's done, she has taken on Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, the counterculture, and more. The 400,000-copy first printing is no surprise.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New Yorker, Louis Menand
Paradise is the strangest and most original book that Morrison has written.... the genius of Paradise is that the biblical subtext is rarely allowed to obtrude on the reader's attention to the gritty particulars of the characters' stories.... One reason that these stories are so gripping is that they are hard to understand. The energy we have to spend puzzling out the various pieces and getting them into some kind of satisfactory narrative shape keeps our focus on the realistic plane of the novel and allows that allegorical machinery to operate more or less hidden from view.


The New York Times Book Review, Brooke Allen
Paradise is Toni Morrison's first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, and it is possibly her best work of fiction to date. Morrison is an extraordinary novelist....


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Richard Eder
It is a fascinating story, wonderfully detailed by Morrison's shrewd and vivid portraits of Ruby's citizens and forebears. But the author has done more than that. Her town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate--always personified and always searching--about black identity and destiny in America's past and present.


From AudioFile
With this recording of her new novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Morrison continues to amplify her written work with her oral interpretations. Paradise is the fifth novel she has recorded. (Previously heard are Sula, Jazz, The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon.) Her readings are essential adjuncts to her literature as her voice and emphasis are keys to the lyrical ambiguity of the texts. Morrison's compelling voice unfurls her narrative of an all-black town in America in the 1970's, tracing the history of the town and four women through generations of cultural differences. The rhythm of her voice accentuates the interplay of fantasy, history and relationships. The ebb and flow of Morrison's energy lulls, then compels the listener. Morrison's interest in the recording of her work affirms the role of the audio format in the appreciation of literature. R.F.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
The violence men inflict on women and the painful irony of an ``all-black town'' whose citizens themselves become oppressors are the central themes of Morrison's rich, symphonic seventh novel (after Jazz, 1992, etc.). The story begins with a scene of Faulknerian intensity: In 1976, in rural Oklahoma, nine men from the nearby town of Ruby attack a former convent now occupied by women fleeing from abusive husbands or lovers, or otherwise unhappy pasts--``women who chose themselves for company,'' whose solidarity and solitude rebuke the male-dominated culture that now exacts its revenge. That sounds simplistic, but the novel isn't, because Morrison makes of it a many-layered mystery, interweaving the individual stories of these women with an amazingly compact social history of Ruby's ``founding'' families and their interrelationships over several decades. It all comes at us in fragments, and we gradually piece together the tale of black freedmen after the Civil War gradually acquiring land and power, taking pride in the culture they've built--vividly symbolized by a memorial called ``the Oven,'' the site of a communal field kitchen into whose stone is etched the biblical command ``Beware the Furrow of His Brow.'' That wrathful prophecy is fulfilled as the years pass, feuds between families and even a rivalry between twin brothers grow ever more dangerous, and in the wake of ``the desolation that rose after King's murder,'' Ruby succumbs to militancy; a Black Power fist is painted on the Oven, and the handwriting is on the wall. With astonishing fluency, Morrison connects the histories of the Convent's insulted and injured women with that of the community they oppose but cannot escape. Only her very occasional resort to digressive (and accusatory) summary (e.g., ``They think they have outfoxed the whiteman when in fact they imitate him'') mars the pristine surface of an otherwise impeccably composed, deeply disturbing story. Not perfect--but a breathtaking, risk-taking major work that will have readers feverishly, and fearfully turning the pages. (First printing of 400,000) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
"They shoot the white girl first. With the others they can take their time." Toni Morrison's first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature opens with a horrifying scene of mob violence then chronicles its genesis in a small all-black town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by descendants of free slaves as intent on isolating themselves from the outside world as it once was on rejecting them, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage... Paradise is a tour de force of storytelling power, richly imagined and elegantly composed. Morrison challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth, into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and the way a society can turn on itself until it is forced to explode.


From the Publisher
Praise for Toni Morrison reading Sula"Toni Morrison's speaking voice contains the same musicality as her prose, and the combination of the two results in a nearly sublime experience."
- The Chicago Tribune". . . it's a storyteller's voice - older than sound recording, older even than print itself."
-The Trenton Times"Morrison's remarkable talent for storytelling naturally lends itself to the spoken word."
- The Arizona Republic

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are 17 miles from a town which has 90 miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun. "They are nine, over twice the number of women they are obliged to stampede or kill and they have the paraphernalia for either requirement: rope, a palm leaf cross, handcuffs, Mace and sunglasses, along with clean, handsome guns."

So begins Toni Morrison's hypnotic and arresting new novel, Paradise, and so will it effectively and hauntingly end. The visit of cruel rage to the Convent frames Paradise, it literally collects and distills all the rich, churning history of this community, focusing the past so that one can say, "[T]he venom is manageable now. Shooting the first woman (the white one) has clarified it like butter: the pure oil of hatred on top, its hardness stabilized below." The cruelty called forth at the Convent will hold and completely transform Morrison's searing account of Ruby, Oklahoma, transform it for the reader as well as for the unhinged citizens of this town. And the slaughter will transform Ruby's "true if aloof neighbor," the mansion-turned-Convent, known, among other things, for its delicious pecan pies and its strings of peppers, "hot as hellfire."

Between the bookends of violence, Morrison unfolds her long-reaching history of Ruby, an insular black enclave in the flatland fields of Oklahoma, pop. 360. The town keeps a vivid memory of slavery and the infinite sacrifices of its ancestors by maintaining a brick oven with a suggestive, oracular grillwork inscription. The Oven once read, "Beware the furrow of His brow," but time has made the iron grill as protean as the history of the town itself, as susceptible to revision as any of their memories.

Chapter by chapter, Morrison patiently spins out the cast of women of the Convent, Connie, Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and the intertwined lives of the townspeople: Soane, Dovey, Patricia, Reverends Pulliam and Misner, the formidable twins Deacon and Steward Morgan, who own the town bank. This is Morrison at her most sure-handed, creating the myths behind the lives of her many characters, at once entangling and disentangling their collective and individual fates. It is why she is perhaps the most celebrated writer in America.

The 1993 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison has forged a hard-edged and lyrical portrait of the American story, exploring the experience of black Americans in her fiction, tracing slavery's roots and the reach of it into life today. Her previous novels include The Bluest Eye (1970); Sula (1973); Song of Solomon (1977), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Tar Baby (1981); the successful Beloved (1987), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; and the beautiful and brilliant Jazz (1992).

Admirers of this previous work will recognize in "Paradise" an affecting undertow of redemption beneath the vivid pull of violence. As with her other novels, it is in Morrison's attention to language that she is able to show her obvious love and respect for the characters in "Paradise". The lyrical intensity and poetry of her language will be familiar, as will her unflinching portrayal of the town's life. With all of their passions, lusts, grudges, dreams, fears, and loves laid bare, the men and women of Ruby and of the Convent seem as fragile and as morally ambiguous as any of us.

What the sins of the Convent are, finally, is not completely apparent to everyone in Ruby, but the prejudices and injustices that fuel the violence are unmistakably clear. As with William Golding's "Lord of the Flies," the lingering question is, How can something so profane rise out of something so seemingly sacred? Just as on the island of those bestial children, there is an impetus toward a violence in islandlike Ruby. And as successful and convincing as the ratcheting up of that violence is, it is in the heart-catching aftermath of the event that Morrison shines brightest, that her writing is the most poignant.

Near the close of the novel, after the slaughter at the Convent, one of the Morgan brothers, Deacon, tells a story about his and his brother's grandfather, one of the town fathers. Grandfather Zechariah "walked barefoot for two hundred miles rather than dance," Deacon explains.

Few knew and fewer remember that Zechariah had a twin, and before he changed his name, they were known as Coffee and Tea. When Coffee got the statehouse job, Tea seemed as pleased as everybody else. And when his brother was thrown out of office, he was equally affronted and humiliated. One day, years later, when he and his twin were walking near a saloon, some whitemen, amused by the double faces, encouraged the brothers to dance. Since the encouragement took the form of a pistol, Tea, quite reasonably, accommodated the whites, even though he was a grown man, older than they were. Coffee took a bullet in his foot instead. From that moment they weren't brothers anymore. Coffee began to plan a new life elsewhere. He contacted other men, other former legislators who had the same misfortune as his -- Juvenal DuPres and Drum Blackhorse. They were the three who formed the nucleus of the Old Fathers. Needless to say, Coffee didn't ask Tea to join them on their journey to Oklahoma.
"I always thought Coffee -- Big Papa -- was wrong," said Deacon Morgan. "Wrong in what he did to his brother. Tea was his twin, after all. Now I'm less sure. I'm thinking Coffee was right because he saw something in Tea that wasn't just going along with some drunken whiteboys. He saw something that shamed him. The way his brother thought about things; the choices he made when up against it. Coffee couldn't take it. Not because he was ashamed of his twin, but because the shame was in himself. It scared him. So he went off and never spoke to his brother again. Not one word. Know what I mean?"

You'll know and feel precisely what he means and more by the end of "Paradise". And the knowledge will not fail to haunt you, just as it haunts all those in Ruby, Oklahoma.--William Lychack

SYNOPSIS

"They shoot the white girl first. With the others they can take their time." Toni Morrison's first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature opens with a horrifying scene of mob violence then chronicles its genesis in a small all-black town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by descendants of free slaves as intent on isolating themselves from the outside world as it once was on rejecting them, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage...

Paradise is a tour de force of storytelling power, richly imagined and elegantly composed. Morrison challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth, into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and the way a society can turn on itself until it is forced to explode.

FROM THE CRITICS

D. T. Max - Salon

For me there are two Toni Morrisons. The first Morrison is intimate and republican. Her theme, most brightly handled in The Bluest Eye, is family. The second Morrison is impersonal and imperial. Her theme, majestically handled, is history. The ironically titled Paradise, like Beloved, belongs to the work of the second Toni Morrison. Sentences roll on like breakers. The generations are born, till the earth and lie beneath. Sing, oh muse!

Paradise begins in 1976 in Ruby, an affluent all-black Oklahoma town with a population of 360, and flashes back to the men and women who founded the town's precursor, Haven, after the Civil War. Haven was decimated not by whites (there are hardly any whites in Paradise) but by the Depression, leading the children of its founders to pick up and move 240 miles to the west and try again.

Nearly every townsperson gets a cameo in the course of this narrative of flawed nation-building. What I wouldn't give for a relationship chart. There are the town's macho leaders, the twins Deacon and Steward Morgan. There are their wives, Soane and Dovey. Both know tragedy. One has had two sons die. The other has had multiple miscarriages, each punished according to the sins of the husband. There is an insurgent outside preacher named Reverend Misner, who is keeping court with an independent woman and store owner named Anna Flood. They are the closest thing to common sense in the town. And there is a no-good lothario named K.D., son of Deacon and Steward's deceased sister Ruby, eponym of the town. Imagine a family reunion when you're not quite catching the names.

The action, though, is simple. As the novel opens, a woman lies dead in the front hall of the Convent, a former Catholic retreat just outside Ruby. The town's alpha menfolk have driven over and shot her, and now they are hunting down the house's remaining inhabitants. Connie, Seneca, Grace, Pallas and Mavis are the prey, female refugees who gathered in this safe place. They have done nothing wrong. Their crime is otherness. Their practices are vaguely occult, vaguely Sapphic and vaguely threatening to law and order. The men mistrust them. In short, they are killed because they can be slain without consequence.

And afterward Ruby is a little bit sorry. Morrison writes: "Bewildered, angry, sad, frightened people pile into cars, making their way back ... How hard they had worked for this place; how far away they once were from the terribleness they have just witnessed. How could so clean and blessed a mission devour itself and become the world they had escaped?" It would not, I think, be a leap to say there is a metaphor here.

There's also a helluva trick, a real coup de theatre, in these last pages. Beloved is no longer Morrison's only ghost story. But you'll have to read from the opening scene, when the guns go off, to the final one, when the chickens come home to roost, to figure this out. This is an extraordinary novel from a Nobel Prize winner confident enough to try anything.

Geoffrey Bent - The Southern Review

In Paradise [Toni Morrison] has produced, unfortunately, her weakest book.... A theme can be pursued as relentlessly as an idea, and repeating a pattern twelve times doesn't make it twelve times more convincing... Paradise has about it a belligerent singlemindedness—one that gives the author's plea for tolerance the uninflected purity of a religious tract.

New Yorker

The strangest and most original book Morrison has written.

Los Angeles Times

...[A] fascinating story...profound and provocative.

Time Magazine