READING AND RANKING ALL OF TONI MORRISON'S NOVELS IN 30 DAYS

I was surprised when a Google search for a ranking of Toni Morrison’s novels came up empty. Only Forbes magazine advertised “The Greatest Toni Morrison Books, Ranked and In Order,” but it turned out this meant they had listed her books in chronological order. This seems a major gap for the Internet, so I read all 12 of her fiction books in less than 30 days and have compiled my own ranking. This diverges from the subject “Stages and Screens” but is a follow-up to my last post, on why more Morrison novels have not been adapted dramatically.

I should note that since finishing the novels, I have found one other blogger who ranked Morrison’s early novels. But I still haven’t found anyone who has ranked them all.

My rankings are strictly my personal preference. Here they are. 

    1. Beloved (1987).

This is a somewhat boring choice, perhaps, as Beloved is widely considered Morrison’s masterpiece, and she spent a fair amount of time resisting any notion that this one dwarfs the others. It does not; it’s a tough call whether to give this one number one or not, but it is in a way the thematic granddaddy of her novels, as all of them are in part about the traumatic legacy of slavery on the African American community, even when the subject is ostensibly something else, and this is the story that zooms in most specifically on that topic. In a story about Morrison’s Jazz, The New York Times described “Morrison’s overarching project of portraying and reflecting Black American life in and after slavery”, which I find not reductive but expansive in depicting Morrison’s life work. Beloved is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, a former slave who killed her children rather than see them enslaved. In this book, however, the ex-slave is Sethe, a fiercely loving mother haunted by the ghost of the child she killed. The story sounds grim, and it is, but through all of Morrison’s stylistic adventurousness and the simple, sometimes humorous style in which she writes, it is anything but a drag to read. Indeed, it’s a fast-paced, lively page turner. See, for example, the first page, in which Morrison introduces the ghost immediately, relating in matter-of-fact magical realist prose that Sethe’s two boys ran away from home because the ghost left a handprint on a cake and shattered a mirror in the house just because someone looked in it. Wry, funny, scary but with the emphasis not on fear. Jumping from one character’s perspective to another in a way that recalls Virginia Woolf but in a voice very much all her own, Morrison wraps up her masterpiece in just 273 taut and beautifully structured pages. There may never be another novel like it. If you’ve only seen the movie starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover, which got a bad rep but is a decent attempt to capture this uncapturable novel, then be sure to read the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. It’s a masterful experience unto itself.

    2. Song of Solomon (1977).

If Beloved was Morrison’s critical breakthrough, Song of Solomon was her breakthrough in sales 10 years earlier. It was her first hit. It’s also her most playfully creative and most stylistically diverse work. The fun begins with the names of the characters: The lead character is Milkman Dead, whose name inspired the famous band The Dead Milkmen. He undergoes a perfectly cinematic journey to discover his roots, and literal sacks of gold. His aunt is named Pilate Dead. His sisters are named "Magdalene called Lena" and First Corinthians. This is the novel that most directly establishes Morrison’s unique method of naming her characters, wherein the names themselves reflect the trauma of slavery. Milkman’s grandfather, Macon Dead the first, had his name dictated by a white government employee who paid too little attention in registering an ex-slave in 1867. (Asked where he was born, Milkman’s grandfather said “Macon.” Asked what his parent’s names were, he answered “They are dead.” The employee wrote down those words on the wrong lines, and the family had acquired its peculiar name.) From the opening pages, where a black man tries to fly, to the closing pages, where one does, the novel is full of mystery and magical realism, tragedy and comedy. One can tell – just barely – that Song of Solomon is an earlier work than Beloved, as its second half relies a little heavily on an objective that Milkman himself concedes is like a fairy tale, and felt to me like that of a video game: finding hidden gold. Also, the great twists and turns of the plot are often communicated in long confessional monologues. But that just makes it fit Tony Kushner’s metaphor for great American literature: that of a lasagna, so stacked with juicy ingredients that it barley stands up. This is a contrast to Toni’s other works, which are structured so immaculately that they stand up better than Kushner’s lasagna. The overstuffed quality makes the novel feel great, and one can see here the influence of Morrison on the great August Wilson as clearly here as anywhere else.

    3. Jazz (1992).

Jazz was Toni Morrison’s personal favorite of her own books, and with good reason. Having told the whole story on the first page of the novel (a married man has an affair with a young girl, then shoots her when he discovers she’s been with someone else), Morrison mesmerizingly explores the event from every angle over 200 plus pages, from what caused it beforehand, to its tragic aftermath. Told non-linearly from the standpoint of multiple characters, Jazz uses the improvisational tools of jazz music itself to comment on many aspects of the Jazz Age of the 1920s. When I read the book, I began by reading it to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, carelessly. This made the drama described in the first page seem somewhat maudlin. So, I put on 1920s jazz music, and a whole new dimension to the title of the book came out. The music largely seems so happy; the words often describe a case of the blues, but the situations in the book made one hear something more complicated than happiness or sadness, something one of Morrison’s characters describes: danger. “She knew from sermons and editorials that it wasn’t real music,” Morrison writes of her character Alice Manfred, the aunt of the girl whose death is described on the first page of the book. “Just colored folks’ stuff: harmful, certainly; embarrassing of course; but not real, not serious. Yet Alice Manfred swore she heard a complicated anger in it; something hostile that disguised itself as flourish and roaring seduction. But the part she hated most was its appetite.” Alice cites the jazz song “Hit me but don’t quit me,” a song title so complicated in its “anger” that when I searched for the song I got a page full of results directing me to domestic violence resources. Jazz describes the sweeping subject of mass migration from the south to the north, and specifically to Harlem in the early years of the 20^th century. That subject, Morrison once said, is not as big as slavery itself, the subject of Beloved. And that is why, she said, people prefer Beloved despite the fact that she prefers Jazz. But in Morrison’s hands it’s no small subject, and Jazz is some of her very best work.  

    4. The Bluest Eye (1970).

The Bluest Eye was Toni Morrison’s first novel and remains one of her most devastating. She wrote it at age 39 while working as an editor at Knopf in New York City, which remained her publisher to the end. It was frowned upon for editors to write, but when her co-workers discovered this novel they celebrated the fact that they had her on their staff. The Bluest Eye tells the story of a young black girl who wishes to have blue eyes. The idea came from Morrison’s childhood in Ohio. She once was debating with a friend whether there was a God or not. Morrison said she believed God existed. Her friend did not, and as evidence she said, for the last two years I have been praying for blue eyes. Her eyes remained black. The first page of the book, as with Jazz, discloses the whole plot. It isn’t pretty, the events the plot circles around. But Morrison knew she wanted to write books that were unflinching in their examination of the worst horrors in Black life. All of the prior black authors, she said in a documentary film, had flinched because they were concerned with what she calls “the white gaze.” Even Frederick Douglass, she said, didn’t write for her. Ralph Ellison, she added, sometimes said it directly in print: that there were some events too horrible to write about directly. That Morrison manages to write about these topics while her novels are so enriching and entertaining is remarkable, but it has gotten this book banned many times. Pecola Breedlove, the young protagonist named for a Douglas Sirk movie about a girl who finds herself ugly because of her racial identity, deserves broader exposure than that. Winfrey went so far as to say everyone should read the book.  

     5. A Mercy (2008).

A Mercy is one of Morrison’s later books but deserves to be ranked with her best. More attention is often given to her early works, but the newer stuff loses very little if any of Morrison’s power. Returning to the subject of slavery, Morrison sets the book between 1682 and 1690 in Colonial America. The book begins with the sale of a young girl named Florens into slavery. In the end we discover she has been writing much of the book on the walls of her quarters, having managed to convince a priest to teach her to read and write at a time it was illegal not only for Black persons to read but for white persons to teach them how. This elegant structure means that one has two options: To read the book more than once to get the full meaning of the early chapters, or to read it once after reading perhaps an online summary. Either way, it is one of Morrison’s most rewarding reads.

    6. Sula (1973).

Sula is not merely about the title character, or her relationship with her best friend; it is about the life of a full Ohio town. The area in question is “the Bottom,” so called because its white owner once promised African Americans prime land at the bottom of a hill if they would agree to do certain difficult work for him. When the work was done, he regretted the promise, so he told them the “bottom” described the less valuable land atop the hill, as it was the bottom of heaven. That the stories of the townspeople are as fascinating as they are well before we meet Sula, and that the full sweep of the town’s tales are told in a mere 174 pages, are a testament to the unbridled power of a writer for whom this was only the second novel.

7. Tar Baby (1981).

Choosing between Sula and Tar Baby is particularly difficult. I keep flipping the two in my mind, back and forth. They both allude to the legend of the tar baby from the Br’er Rabbit stories, in which a white farmer makes a black doll made of tar to deter the rabbit from eating the farmer’s vegetables. The more the rabbit argues with the tar baby, the more deeply entangled in the tar baby he becomes. The protagonist couple in Tar Baby are like that: Jadine and Son have knock-down, drag-out fights, become chaotically enmeshed in each other’s stories, and Son resents the fact that (as he points out) Jadine was “made” like the Tar Baby by a white man. The white man is a rich candy manufacturer on a Caribbean island, whose paternalistic treatment of his Black servants ignites the story’s second half. In the first half, Son swims to that island from a ship on which he has stowed away, a fugitive on the run from an accidental death he caused years before. Their respective journeys are symbolic of the path of the African American in the late 20^th century. The novel is a fast and furious read.

8. Home (2012).

Described by the jacket copy on the paperback edition implies as loosely based on Odysseus’ journey home to Ithaca in The Odyssey, Home is the one Morrison novel on the impact of war on the Black community. Frank Money is a veteran from the Korean War who travels from Seattle to Atlanta to rescue his sister. The obstacles on his journey are mostly interior, as he recovers from the scars of his time overseas in the evils of war. It is as redemptive as anything Morrison has written. Home fills a necessary gap in Morrison’s depiction of the landscape of black life over four centuries in her 12 novels.   

9. God Help the Child (2015).

Toni Morrison’s last novel, written just three years before the “Me Too” movement, is in large measure about the prevalence of child abuse in the marginalized communities and its roots and impacts. It focuses on a girl who when very young falsely accused her teacher of abuse—a focus not entirely consistent with the emphases of Me Too, as one of the major threads of the movement was that accusers should be believed—but the characters are surrounded by other instances of abuse. I lost count at, I think, six separate instances of abuse. It’s only the second Morrison novel to take place in the present day (after Tar Baby) and includes the first academic character in all of Morrison. Booker is a graduate student in economic theory, and his assessment of Adam Smith and Marx is detailed in the narrative. He feels wealth is the cause of much of the world’s suffering. That narrative shifts from one character’s perspective to another. The taut novel is an interesting and fast-moving read; it is not a tract on abuse.

10. Love (2003).

Love depicts some of the downsides that have come with the Civil Rights movement, not as criticism but as an exploration of an unwritten story. Bill Cosey, dead by the time the novel opens, was a successful Black entrepreneur whose seaside resort was flocked to by African Americans of means in the days of segregation, but whose business falls apart as integration sweeps the country and his customers can go to any hotel. That would be enough for a substantive novel by itself, but Love is more about Cosey’s impact on the women in his life than about Cosey himself. It centers on the battles between his widow, Heed, and his granddaughter, Christine, who like so many of Morrison’s protagonists were best friends before he married Heed at eleven years old, in a southern state where child marriage was allowed. More than other Morrison novels, this one late in the book sinks ever so slightly into a soap opera tone, but it is rich and layered and depending on which side of the book one is gazing upon could rank higher on this list.

11. Recitatif (1983, 2022).

Recitatif, named for the French word for dialogue in an opera, is yet another story from Morrison about childhood friends who drift in and out of each other’s lives as the book progresses. But unlike the rest of her books, the conceit of this one is that it’s impossible to tell which of the two characters is white and which is black. I rank Recitatif with the novels because it has been published in 2022 as a stand-alone book, but it is really a short story. It was intended to be so, as Zadie Smith points out in a long essay in the 2022 edition that admiringly admits frustration with the book’s refusal to hint at the race of its characters. Smith notes that most novelists write copious short stories, some of which become novels, and some of which die out incomplete. It is a testament to her brilliance that Morrison always knew which she was writing and that her books are tightly and immaculately structured. This was apparently the only short story she wrote. It ranks lower than the other books not because it isn’t a quality read, but because it is slighter and is an experiment, if not a novelty act: It is indeed frustrating not to know the race of the characters. Is this our flaw, or the story’s? Morrison insists we examine that frustration.

12. Paradise (1998).

This is the last book in Toni Morrison’s so-called Beloved trilogy, which wasn’t really intended to be a trilogy but which can loosely be compared to Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, with Beloved representing hell and Jazz representing purgatory. It is easily Morrison’s least beloved novel, and with good reason. The book, which tells the story of a city comprising only black residents and a convent nearby, introduces character after character with little relation to one another except where they end up. The end, which is depicted in the first chapter of the novel, shows us the residents of the small town walking into the convent and shooting its female residents. With some counting the characters at more than 100, it suffers more than benefits from this excess. But it may reward repeat reads; that Paradise is last on this list only shows what a strong list it is.