New Morrison

Last week's furor over the Nobel Prize and American "insulatiry" got Toni Morrison's name back in the news. Turns out to be good timing for her, as she has a new book publishing over here in a month. The Observer profiles her:

They have made every novel since her third, published three decades ago, into a bestseller and ensured that first edition copies of her debut fetch in excess of $10,000. Message boards are abuzz with the advance word on her forthcoming novel, A Mercy, her first in five years. She is, according to the New York Times, 'the nearest thing America has to a national novelist'.

There's precious little on the forthcoming book, though. Among what can be gleaned:

Her new novel, A Mercy, is a 'prelude' to Beloved. Set in 17th-century America, its central character, Florens, is a Morrison heroine through and through, a slave girl forced upon a trader in lieu of a debt. Yet elsewhere the story is much more complicated. This is just before sugar took off as a commodity, just before the demand for human labour made the slave trade into the monstrous machine that it became by the time Beloved begins. Hardship is everywhere and religious prejudice is as virulent as racism. Most of the novel's characters are victims and all are trying to make something of themselves.

And I didn't realize that Wood was among those who fault her style:

James Wood and Edna O'Brien have been among her detractors, while the trenchant if grouchy cultural critic Stanley Crouch called Beloved 'protest pulp fiction'. Meanwhile, black novelist Charles Johnson has bemoaned her depiction of men and whites and dubbed her Nobel victory 'a triumph of political correctness'.