Book Review: God Help the Child

BOOK Review: God Help the Child

Author: Toni Morrison

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Pages: 208

Rs: 455

God Help the Child, the eleventh in Toni Morrison's iconic oeuvre, is a book of many frustrations. Coming as it does as part of her more experimental latter-day writing phase, it has at its core the skeletons of many greater more powerful books. They're all hinted at in chapters here, little paths scattered about that could have led to stories more compelling if fully explored.

It could have been about a young black girl growing up negotiating a still deeply racist America where her own lighter skinned parents cannot love her because of her deeply "blue-black" skin. It could have been about the fraught relationship this girl-turned-gorgeous woman, our protagonist Bride, must now have with the mother who withheld her love and touch.

It could have been about Bride and the innocent women she sent to jail, when as a child she testified against her in a child sexual abuse case. It could be about the grown up Bride dealing with her childhood emotional abuse as she came to know the enigmatic young girl, Rain, a victim of sex abuse at the hands of a mother who pimped her out to men. It could even have been about Bride, beautiful, successful but deeply insecure, and her complicated friendship with her self-proclaimed best friend Brooklyn, a woman whose feelings towards her are less straightforwardly affectionate as she deals with a relationship where she is clearly the caregiver, the one who cleans up the messes of our fairly self-involved protagonist.

Instead, all these bonds, these meeting points between unlikable but deeply interesting characters are thrown together as minor diversions from the linchpin of the book, the heterosexual romance between Bride and Booker. Instead of a book, or a multitude of stories that could have dug deep into the murkiness in familial ties, into bonds between different women, it concentrates on the coming together of two characters who only seem to get along because they don't really know each other or have to talk much.

Again, the premise of this relationship is one rich with potential. Bride, with her emotional scars, her witnessing child rape early in life and Booker, who as a child lost a brother to a serial killer could have made for a gripping look into the skewed dynamics of romantic relationships. Who holds power and who is vulnerable, the constant underlying struggle against the status quo that can make or break a relationship, whether past baggage can be overcome or do people let them doom themselves and those closest. However, these remain ideas on a whiteboard, they never come to life in the novel itself.

The salvation of the novel comes at the very end. Bride and Booker think their child will save their relationship and be their means to make amends, when Morrison turns the narrative over to Bride's mother, Sweetness, who signs off on a note of realistic caution, that a child is never the answer to all problems and neither will it escape the damage that adults will inevitably inflict.

Morrison has always been a great believer in the power of language and the purpose of fiction beyond entertainment, as is evident in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Here, too, her skills as a craftsperson are on full display as she weaves narrative within narrative without losing any one plot. Racial discrimination and child abuse inform the book, as all characters deal with one or both forms of inhumanity. However, the reader wishes it could have been more show and less tell. It remains, so to speak, great on paper not so much in execution, especially the surprisingly dull use of magic realism, when Bride's body starts reverting back to childhood as she lose control over her adult life. From an author who used language and magic realism so majestically in Beloved, one expects more.