LOVE is about a man named Bill Cosey and the women who jostle for his affections and whose enmity perseveres through several decades of backstabbing and recriminations. Such quarreling, LOVE makes clear, is "shortsighted, though. What good does it do to keep a favorite hate going when the very person you've poisoned your life with is the one (maybe the only one) able or willing to carry you to the bathroom when you can't get there on your own?"
A successful black entrepreneur who runs a popular beach resort on the East Coast --- most likely North or South Carolina --- Bill Cosey has a gregarious personality and a natural talent for attracting the wealthiest clientele and the jazziest musicians to his hotel. He also possesses a more destructive tendency for surrounding himself for more than half a century with "needy, wild women." Whether they were needy and wild before they met him, however, or whether he made them so with his easy talk and errant attention is left purposefully vague and slyly suggestive. How good a man is Bill Cosey? Or is he as brazen as the women who surround him, his reputation protected by his gender?
A novel about the past, LOVE begins closer to the present, with a young woman, Junior Viviane, long a resident of juvenile correctional halls, applying for a job in the big house at One Monarch Street, inhabited by two warring women: Heed Cosey, Bill's much younger second wife, now his widow, and Christine, his granddaughter.
"Each woman," Morrison writes, "lived in a spotlight separated --- or connected --- by the darkness between them." While Heed, the beneficiary of her husband's contested will, lives a lonely life in the house's richly appointed upper floors, Christine resides in the small, spare basement apartment near the kitchen. Confined to the same house, they still stay as far away from each other as possible, their silence erupting into violent arguments once every year or so.
As LOVE progresses, Morrison reveals the interconnectedness of their lives, the strange ways they are related and the strong bond they maintain despite their mutual hostility. In doing so she depicts a large cast of mostly compelling characters who haunt the novel's periphery: Christine's mother, May Cosey, whose husband died early and left her the thankless job of running her father-in-law's hotel; L, the gifted cook who provides a balanced commentary against the hysterical grievances of the main characters; and Sandler Gibbons, Bill's fishing buddy whose grandson, Romen, now works for the Cosey women and is Junior's lover.
As she reveals new depths of connection between them, Morrison brings these characters together to squabble over Bill Cosey and his estate, giving LOVE the tone of a soap opera --- "just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children, a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down." And too often Morrison seems too willing to let LOVE descend to the level of "pointless malice," which infects her prose and her themes with soap-opera formulas.
Certain phrases stand out against the well-crafted mellifluousness of Morrison's otherwise remarkably restrained prose. Hackneyed clichés pop up and stand out, like "When Christine opened the door she found Ernie locked in the arms of the staff sergeant's wife." Elsewhere, Morrison painfully overstates the novel's meaning, such as when one character remarks, "it's like we started out being sold, got free of it, then sold ourselves to the highest bidder." It doesn't help that another character responds, "Who you mean 'we'? Black people? Women? You mean me and you?" This is certainly true and well observed, but already apparent to even a casual reader.
Such missteps reveal just how forcefully Morrison is straining to make LOVE work, to stretch a threadbare family saga to cover such large ideas about race and gender. That she does make it work at all, that her insights more often than not hit their targets, and that LOVE is readable and fascinating seem like an extreme act of will, and there is a certain purity in such literary labor. Morrison works so hard in LOVE, and her hard work pays off for her and for the reader --- mostly.
--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner