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By Toni Morrison
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Selection: 1998
Toni Morrison's Paradise takes place in the tiny farming community of Ruby, Oklahoma, which its residents proudly proclaim
"the one all-black town worth the pain." Settled by nine African American clans during the 1940s, the town represents a small
miracle of self-reliance and community spirit. Readers might be forgiven, in fact, for assuming that Morrison's title refers
to Ruby itself, which even during the 1970s retains an atmosphere of neighborliness and small-town virtue. Yet Paradises are
not so easily gained. As we soon discover, Ruby is fissured by ancestral feuds and financial squabbles, not to mention the
political ferment of the era, which has managed to pierce the town's pious isolation. In the view of its leading citizens,
these troubles call for a scapegoat. And one readily exists: the Convent, an abandoned mansion not far from town--or, more
precisely, the four women who occupy it, and whose unattached and unconventional status makes them the perfect targets for
patriarchal ire. ("Before those heifers came to town," the men complain, "this was a peaceable kingdom.") One July morning,
then, an armed posse sets out from Ruby for a round of ethical cleansing.
Paradise actually begins with the arrival of these vigilantes, only to launch into an intricate series of flashbacks and
interlaced stories. The cast is large--indeed, it seems as though we must have met all 360 members of Ruby's populace--and
Morrison knows how to imprint even the minor players on our brains. Even more amazing, though, are the full-length portraits
she draws of the four Convent dwellers and their executioners: rich, rounded, and almost painful in their intimacy. This
richness--of language and, ultimately, of human understanding--combats the aura of saintliness that can occasionally mar
Morrison's fiction. It also makes for a spectacular piece of storytelling, in which such biblical concepts as redemption
and divine love are no postmodern playthings but matters of life and (in the very first sentence, alas) death.
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