Beloved, by Toni Morrison (Knopf, 275 pp., $18.95)
Toni Morrison’s language is thick as menstrual flow. Rich as clotted milk on the shirtfront of a nursing mother. I adduce such images intentionally: the way, I’m sure, Toni Morrison herself did—to shock, to discompose, to trap attention on a vivid sensual plane. Since Song of Solomon at least, this has been her most conspicuous mannerism. Not that she uses the obscene. Far from it: her euphemisms, in fact, are what unsettle most —so some childish locution for male genitalia (“wee-wee,” say) can disgust more than a robust Anglo-Saxon expletive. In Beloved there is terrific verbal evasion. An adolescent girl, desiring sex, will tell her man, “I want you to touch me on the inside part.” Dreadful whip scars are “a chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk . . . red and split wide open, full of sap.” Metaphors in Beloved don’t describe, they replace: and they are often brilliant, now and then obsessive or infantile, usually moving. And the opposite, believe me, of squeamish.
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