God Help The Child by Toni Morrison

I’ve got to read more Toni Morrison.

Like many of the canonical novelists who I missed when reading famous novels in my undergraduate years and early twenties, the novels of this Nobel laureate that I have read are not those supposed to be her best. The reason for this is pretty basic – a societal push (including from the course selections of my provincial English Literature university degree a lifetime ago) treating the work of dead white men as the pinnacles of literature, and by the time I realised I needed to open up my reading beyond that, the taint of “Nobel winner” and “best-selling” and “published by the biggest publishing houses in the world” made me erroneously presume that anyone lauded by the literary establishment should be avoided if one is trying to read better and wider.

That’s foolish behaviour, of course, and I eventually learned that later on, too, hence why I began reading Morrison as and when books of hers fell organically into my hands. Those I have read before – Sula (1973) and Jazz (1992) – were masterpieces, and I know I have more (though I don’t remember which) sitting somewhere in the boxes of books that I am yet to unpack since moving from Toronto back to London (boooo) just under three years ago. (I have yet to buy shelves.)

God Help The Child (2015) was Morrison’s final novel, and though brilliant, heartbreaking, emotive, powerful, articulate, playful and triumphant, I did have to check at one point if it was posthumous or not… Not because it’s bad, but because it’s short and somewhat abrupt, and also a little strange.

I was neither surprised nor unsurprised to find out the work wasn’t posthumous, but what did shock me was the fact that Morrison was well into her 80s when this was written and published, which makes the novel all the more impressive not only because it’s an engaging, evocative novel written by someone way beyond the age when the average mind has begun to succumb to cognitive decline, but because it perfectly captures the voice and the life and the feeling of thought of (what were then) youthful millennials.

I can struggle to think of examples where youth has been so unhesitatingly and unpatronisingly rendered by someone so old. It does not feel like a satire or a spoof or an exaggeration or an experiment at evoking the voice of a person three (four? two?) generations younger than the writer, but instead the first person chapters here from the perspective of a millennial feel far more realistically and humanly rendered than most novels I’ve read written by actual millennials…

Quite possibly this is because the people who are able to get novels about being young published while still young(ish) aren’t the people with the wider lived experience necessary to render a rounded-feeling person into prose…

No one from my generation, also, is fucking Toni Morrison, are they? I’m sure the millennial Toni Morrison, yes, is out there somewhere, learning to write excellently and soon to produce books of flawless beauty, but I don’t think they’re here yet. Or, at least, I haven’t read them yet (and if I don’t know about something, I don’t know about it. So feel free to condescendingly stick some recommendations of writers I should be embarrassed not to have read in the Comments. And don’t name me any Gen X writers, as I can think of a few who (arguably) do matter, at least a little, and that’s not what I’m talking about…)

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A few times while reading God Help The Child, I was struck by the thought that it felt likely Morrison had read A Little Life, because this novel often reminded me of the tone and overall high and constant misery of Hanya Yanagihara’s fiction. However, when I checked the publication gap between them, I was shocked to discover that those two novels were published only a month or so apart (both 2015), which means that the idea that fiction could – and, sometimes, should – be a catalogue of the most unpleasant things possible had permeated literary culture.

God Help the Child is a book full of horrors – of assaults, of cruelty, of false accusations of abuse, of genuine abuse, of broken relationships, broken trust, of poor parenting, of accidents, of injuries, of violence and sabotage and selfishness and meanness and discrimination and racism and classism and greed and betrayal – but it never becomes hopeless, and never seems to argue or imply that love and beauty and hope and meaning are things one should eschew or lose faith in.

I won’t summarise the plot more than this: horrible things happen, both to good and to neutral people, and repercussions and regrets and recriminations fly. And there’s also a bit of magical realism and a little bit from time to time about music.

It’s a treat to read something that’s so well-constructed, that’s so clear and yet poetic, that’s so beautiful and so emotive and so embodied.

It’s about bodies, yes, it’s about youth, too, and different ideas of care and different ideas of what is good and what isn’t… about corrosive ideas of respect and respectability, of what could and should and shouldn’t be done.

It’s heart-breaking and hopeful, it’s cruel and it’s neat and it’s meandering and it’s unpredictable and it’s meaningful and humane and is, again, a writer in their mid-80s doing some of the best writing I’ve read about being a youngish person in the 2010s.

Highly recommended. I’ve got to open up my boxes of books and find the other Morrison texts hiding within…

YES!!!