Paradise.

Toni Morrison. Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1998. 318 pp. $25.00.

In the lyrical prose that has become her trademark, Toni Morrison weaves her latest novel on the loom of a single question: Why do we base our conception of "paradise" on separation and exclusion? Her story illustrates how densely complicated is the fabric of our desire to be set apart, and how numerous and strong are the forces tearing at our efforts to achieve such a utopia. With a sensitivity that evidences her respect for her characters--residents of a town named Ruby and a mansion called the Convent--Morrison renders their hopes and fears in multi-dimensional, often heartbreaking detail.

We are familiar with the territory being fought over in Paradise. Male-dominated turf and woman-centered space. Putatively porous boundaries of racial integration in opposition to rigid racial separatism. Skin-color-coded zones. Generational gaps widened into chasms. Morrison explores these divisions, focusing on the places where the battle or fault lines intersect, or briefly merge. Her characters never stand in for a position; rather, each struggles to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable needs and desires. She achieves conceptual complexity through a painstakingly recreated geographical and historical setting and the loving depiction of characters who are as diverse as they are human.

Ruby, Oklahoma, is a second-generation all-black town, established in 1949. Its chronological and spiritual predecessor, Haven, was founded by the patriarchs of nine strong, proud families who led more than one hundred formerly enslaved black people from Louisiana and Mississippi to the Oklahoma Territory. In 1889, the Territory boasted several newly established all-black towns, which advertised for settlers. These eager, independent, midnight-skinned blacks soon learned that the towns they had walked across country to help develop were peopled with light-skinned blacks who wanted to live as separately from them as from whites. Having been rejected, they called on their God to show them to their own Paradise, a "Haven" of hallowed ground from which they could reject the rest of the world in return.

Haven enjoyed a few decades of prosperity, but by the time its young men returned from fighting overseas in the late 1940s, the town had mired in the quicksand of its own isolation. These young men determined to migrate farther west and start anew with all those families who had the money, strength, and heart for the venture. Thus, Ruby was founded on exactly the same principles that Haven had been sixty years earlier, unmistakably signified by the relocation of the brick Oven that was Haven's functional and symbolic core to the new town.

Seventeen miles from where they would establish Ruby, a mansion built by a gambler had been converted by nuns into a school for Native American girls. In 1949, the Convent, as it became known, was running out of funding and subjects for its mission. By 1968, only Consolata, kidnapped as a child from the streets of a South American city, and the nun who stole her away remained. In that year, the Convent assumed a new mission: sheltering women who had lost their way and found themselves unable to live anywhere else.

Structurally and aesthetically, Paradise is typical of Morrison's later work. The novel is the third volume in a trilogy--with Beloved and Jazz--focusing on the relationship between excessive love and violence. Morrison's postmodern approach to language and narrative combines a poetic insistence upon the importance of every word with magical realism's freedom from linearity and representational constraints. From her show-stopping opening line ("They shoot the white girl first") through the final paragraph, her narrative voice consistently moves the story forward, even in numerous flashbacks, without sacrificing a single beautiful detail, as in a townswoman's description of the sign that preceded the first visit of her ancestral Friend:

She had been upstairs, tidying the little foreclosed house, and paused to look through a bedroom window. Down below the leaf-heavy trees were immobile as a painting. July. Dry. One hundred degrees. Still, opening the windows would freshen the room that had been empty for a year....Then a mighty hand dug deep into a giant sack and threw fistfuls of petals into the air. Or so it seemed, Butterflies. A trembling highway of persimmon-colored wings cut across the green treetops forever--then vanished.

Morrison's narrative voice, which created masterful effects in both Beloved and Jazz, approaches perfection in this latest novel, a harmony of the lyric and the narrative.

The novel's nine chapters bear the names of female characters from the town or the Convent. Within this framework, however, narrative perspective changes frequently and narrative focus shifts geographically, chronologically, individually. The effect is sometimes disconcerting, as the reader works to locate events and characters against one another, but the reward is the pleasure of tracing ribbons of language and plot through a colorful, intricate weave.

The novel turns on what Ruby's patriarchs decide are the first signs that their Paradise is threatened. Youngsters are rebelliously advocating change. Their women are walking the road to the Convent, returning damaged or not at all. Nine men, Ruby's self-appointed saviors, ride out to the Convent to rid the town of its nearest danger: these women who "out here in wide-open space tucked away in a mansion--no one to bother or insult them--...managed to call into question the value of almost every woman [they] knew."

Morrison refuses to allow the novel's meaty grappling to dissolve into tidy answers. Townswomen befriend Convent women and listen sympathetically to the youngsters' pleas but continue to believe deeply in their God and in many of the traditional values Ruby was established to preserve. Patriarchs affirm the lessons and blessings of a remembered history, but also begin to recognize that their religious zeal and preservationist instincts may constitute the greatest threat to Ruby's survival. Convent women scoff at the townspeople's ascetic lifestyle, yet salvage each other through a fierce love and isolation not entirely different from Ruby's grounding ethos. Nothing is simple. Paradise, a novel whose working title was "War," tells a story about Us versus Them, beginning with a man shooting a gun. Only readers unfamiliar with Morrison's previous work would expect the battle lines to be clearly drawn, or look for a victor to emerge when the smoke has cleared.