Lennon, Brian. "Paradise Relinquished." Review of Paradise by Toni Morrison. The Boston Book Review 5.2 (March 1998): 46.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

Promise brought an entire African-American generation to New York in the 1920s, and much of what was most poignant in Toni Morrison's last novel, Jazz (1992), suggested the play of fated shadows against the backdrop of what, in the best of all possible worlds, might have been. As its title signals, Paradise is also a story of exodus and of promise. As in the last work (and its antecedent, Beloved), novelized epic posits intelligible continuity between the historical present---here, an all-black Oklahoma town in the 1970s---and its historical source in African-American emancipation. And there is an embattled, if not embittered sense that moral destiny is always doubled---that the meek do not often inherit the earth, regardless of virtue; that those who do evil do not always get what they deserve.

In Paradise, exodus is measured not in thousands of miles, but in hundreds; it is an exchange, not of Southern rural for Northern urban life, but of one Oklahoma settlement for another. Haven, we learn, was founded by one hundred fifty-eight freedmen from Mississippi and Louisiana who, "turned away by rich Choctaw and poor whites, chased by yard dogs, jeered at by camp prostitutes and their children... were nevertheless unprepared for the aggressive discouragement they received from Negro towns already being built." Settling in the western part of Oklahoma Territory in 1890, they built a town around a community kitchen called the Oven. When veterans of the Second World War return to their economically ruined and nearly abandoned Haven in 1949, they break up the Oven, load it on a truck, and move their families west, "headed not for Muskogee or California as some had, or Saint Louis, Houston, Langston or Chicago, but deeper into Oklahoma, as far as they could climb from the grovel contaminating th[text missing]"

But all this is scene-setting, for the present of this novel is the year 1974. The younger generation has little reverence for the Oven, or for the community's tradition of isolation; they favor a militant confrontation with whites. Once again, the enclave faces mass desertion. To make matters worse, in what was once a convent on the edge of town, an unstable household of female outsiders are engaging in idolatry and sexual misconduct---so it's said. Faced with the disintegration of their paradise, the New Fathers of Ruby, Oklahoma set out to rid themselves of its agents.

Paradise is framed by an act of violence carried out by men upon women, and this brutality is echoed in the life-narratives of each of the Convent tenants, told in the successive chapters bearing their names: Grace, Seneca, Divine, Pallas, Consolata. Blending Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian iconography, such allegorical referents sit engraved in Paradise's header pages like lettering on ruins. Other characters' appellations---Ruby, Mavis, Patricia---are drawn from more worldly registers. But they are all women's names, and the paradise of "blessed malelessness" that is the Convent echoes the blessed whitelessness of Haven/Ruby. That one good turns on and destroys the other, here, is one key to this work's complex ambivalence.

If Paradise is perhaps less formally inventive or provocative than either Beloved or Jazz, this is not to say, of course, that this latest work presents anything but a complex architecture. Morrison's narrator drops us in medias res and then glides backward and forward in time, weaving around and over and finally through the needle-eye of the plot, disclosed in the very first paragraph:

They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun.

Layer upon layer of narrative---that of the citizens of Haven/Ruby as a people, those of the Convent women as individuals---will have encased and fortified this scene before we return to it, three hundred pages later. In that sense, most of the novel's action takes place in a real time of mere moments, all else being disclosed in the dilating dramatic space separating the commencement of the attack from its conclusion. If that, in itself, is not a suggestive inversion of Paradise, what is?

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