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In Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels, Jean Wyatt offers a brilliant and accessible examination of how theme and form complement and augment one another in Morrison’s work. Carefully examining ways in which love is represented through both content and form, Wyatt highlights for the reader how form speaks increasingly directly in Morrison’s novels through the evocative nature of the very structure of the language itself. Undergirding Morrison’s efforts, suggests Wyatt, is an ethical imperative that drives a rendering of traumatic truths into language that in some cases brings visibility to those truths and, in others, eludes trauma’s telling. Through Wyatt’s careful analysis, we see how Morrison’s project evolves from an elaboration of traumatic truths towards the possibility of an adaptive and transformative working through. Informing Wyatt’s readings of these novels is a judicious use of psychoanalytic concepts and theory regarding the impact of trauma on human development and relationships, in which she uses such concepts sparingly and to good effect. Like a drop of water in fine Scotch, Wyatt’s discriminating deployment of theory opens up and illuminates the texts.
Taking us through the novels sequentially, Wyatt highlights the evolution of Morrison’s position on the layered dilemmas of race, shame, and love from a direct reporting – such that they might be faced rather than erased – towards an active advocation of a stand that affords the possibility of transformation. Through her close examination of these novels, Wyatt invites the reader to consider how Morrison uses “disruptions of chronological narrative sequence [to] reflect the dislocations of African American history” (p. 95) and also, in this way, to mark the aesthetic sensibilities encoded in the rhythms of meaning anchored in that history. These aesthetic sensibilities track complex patterns of nonverbal meanings that may have profound impact without being consciously recognized (Ch