Trigger warnings follow the book review.
How should we categorize Beloved? Its opening pages designate it as a paranormal novel. Sethe, a woman who escaped enslavement on the terrifying Sweet Home plantation, lives with her teenage daughter, Denver, in their Cincinnati house. However, their home also hosts a vengeful presence: the ghost of Sethe’s infant daughter. Like a magician flourishing her best tricks, the spirit draws from the classics of ghostly activity. Mirrors shatter. Handprints appear in cakes. And, in the baby’s strongest expression of rage, the house shakes. But early on, Paul D–a man who was enslaved alongside Sethe and with whom she develops a complicated romance–arrives and seemingly banishes the ghost. Mere chapters later, Beloved again veers into the paranormal, but with a flesh-and-blood twist. A woman appears at Sethe’s house, whose name–Beloved–mirrors the epitaph on Sethe’s daughter’s tombstone, and who is chillingly adept at bonding with Denver, chasing Paul D away, emotionally manipulating Sethe, and overindulging her sense of abandonment and anger…
However, crime is also at Beloved’s forefront. The clearest “crime” is Sethe’s daughter’s death, an event whose heinousness is revealed later and that (literally) haunts the principal characters. But the inherently criminal institution of slavery underpins Beloved as well. It is steeped both in the crimes the institution justifies in its perpetrators’ minds, and in the often-horrific efforts of the enslaved to escape. Beloved’s nonlinearity, which enables flashbacks into Sethe and Paul D’s past sufferings, only furthers this emphasis on how slavery weighs down characters’ lives. Although they are physically “free,” their memories are always on the verge of grinding them into the dust.
Obviously, Beloved isn’t a “light” novel. There are some confusing elements–such as its stream-of-consciousness passages delving into the minds of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved and blending them in a haunting mixture–that might spook readers. But they’re missing out if they let such a feature influence their choice to read it. Really, there are other parts that shine brightly enough to prove reading Beloved is worth the risk of getting lost in the weeds.
For me, Beloved’s greatest allure is its lush prose. It makes the book startlingly vivid, but this sharpness makes it harder to escape the horrors battering the characters. Morrison is admirably relentless in bombarding readers with grim imagery and opulent language in ways that make the book terribly beautiful; Sethe refers to Sweet Home as “fire and brimstone hidden in lacy groves,” and this descriptor fits Morrison’s writing too. I adore her prose for its multilayered meaning–where Morrison could’ve used simplistic “bird” language, she opts for “hawks” and “hummingbirds” to convey characters’ feelings about Sethe’s daughter’s death–and fear it for its stifling sensory assault. I also enjoyed Beloved’s fresh approach to the supernatural. While many characters in supernatural novels refuse to address the presence of the spectral, it is instead a fact of life for Beloved’s protagonists. No time is wasted on persuading characters of the supernatural’s existence, which improves the book’s narrative rhythm.
However, these assets don’t entirely remedy Beloved’s inconsistent pacing, which is my biggest stumbling block. The book’s first half plods forward: Beloved worms her way into Sethe and Denver’s relationship, and the outings the trio enjoys unspool in a thoroughly plotted fashion. Yet by Beloved’s conclusion, the plot proceeds at breakneck speed. The reader experiences the rapid collapse of these relationships in glancing, skimming descriptions, and the “problem” of Beloved is resolved in a few pages. Visually represented, this novel’s structure would be a sketch whose front half is intricately drawn, only to devolve into hasty scribbles. However, the book’s nonlinearity slightly conceals this unevenness by interspersing flashbacks and other characters’ stories among the triad’s narrative: this breaks up the Sethe-Beloved-Denver narrative, making it harder to catch how quickly the women’s bonds disintegrate. Consequently, this issue doesn’t utterly mar Beloved’s beauty. Morrison also has rhetorical reasons for pacing the book unevenly. I didn’t enjoy the pacing, but it’s important to recognize it is deliberate technique, not authorial fallacy.
So I ask again: how do we categorize Beloved? I believe Beloved isn’t a novel that can be pigeonholed. It is a novel about the paranormal and crime, yes. But it is also about mothers and daughters and fractured relationships that either can’t heal or heal like broken bones set wrong. Beloved isn’t a book you “enjoy” for pleasure, but a book you can respect for its striking prose and unflinching descriptions. It is a necessary concoction readers must appreciate for what it does for them internally, even as they must also acknowledge its bitterness.
Rating: 4.5 of 5 stars. A hauntingly beautiful, if unevenly paced, book.
Trigger warnings: Child death, implied rape, bestiality