Toni Morrison.

Jil Matus. Toni Morrison. New York: Manchester UP, 1998. 208 pp. $59.95.

Jill Matus examines Toni Morrison's novels through the goals of the "Contemporary World Writers" series, which aims to present "comprehensive general introductions" to the authors featured. The series provides these introductions by examining the writers' cultural contexts while also considering the hybrid nature of these contexts, and by combining current theoretical post-colonial studies impulses with particular textual readings of each work. It also looks at the ways the writers adapt or subvert Western genres, or rework "'traditional' local forms." With these varied goals in mind, Matus competently combines a thorough examination of earlier Morrison criticism with her own strong readings of Morrison's first six novels. In addition, she provides an overview of the novels' literary and historical contexts and a brief look at Morrison's latest novel, Paradise (1998).

As she begins her overview of criticism of Toni Morrison's fiction, Jill Matus cites the Swedish Academy's description of Morrison's novels as "characterized by visionary force and poetic import" while "giv[ing] life to an essential aspect of American reality." According to Matus, this description captures two important trajectories of Morrison criticism--one which focuses on her language and another which emphasizes the place specifics of African American life have in her writing. Matus follows both avenues, using memory as a jumping off point for each exploration. In her contextualization of Morrison's work, Matus takes New Historicist and post-colonial approaches, emphasizing the importance of writing African American experiences into an American literary landscape in order to counter an active erasure carried out by limited historical accounts and by nostalgia.

Focusing on Morrison's intervention into the erasure of African American experience from the American literary and historical narrative, Matus calls The Bluest Eye (1970) "an imagined history of what it is to grow up black and female in the 1930s and 1940s." She points out that Morrison creates a community set upon by "standards, aspirations, and self-valuations" from outside which are not only a result of popular images community members consume, but also the result of the labor relationships and class positions which are inflected by race. She believes the novel's project is to reveal the difficulties of maintaining strong community and individual cores in the face of racial devaluations which have personal, social, and economic consequences. Matus characterizes the communities of each of Morrison's novels in ways which similarly focus on the social, cultural, and economic influences under which they operate, often turning to historical phenomena, such as the northward migration which produced the Harlem community of Jazz (1992), as background against which to read the stories.

The times Matus brings in historical events against which to read the texts which can exaggerate the novels' intervention into historical narrative; however these moments do not last long. Matus's examination returns to Morrison's texts, considering how the characters' specific engagement with such broad movements "resists any monolithic categorisation of black identity." For example, Mains points to how Morrison intervenes in the dominant positive narrative of the Harlem Renaissance by having Violet and Joe witness rather than participate in the movements blossoming around them and experience skin color prejudice despite the positive emphasis on "blackness" in Harlem. Matus uses such narrative specificities to read Morrison's work against that of other authors, in this case Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Alain Locke, showing how Morrison's vision of Harlem focuses on its limitations as well as its successes, and how her work stands in (possibly) ironic contrast to theirs.

Matus's other use of memory focuses on the characters' recollection of traumatic events. She employs psychoanalytic criticism and post-structuralist theory as lenses through which to view Morrison's work. Mains begins with several different theories of trauma, including Kai Erickson's, which states that people may be traumatized over time by a "constellation of life experiences" such as the daily pressures of racism rather than by a single catastrophe. Another compelling theory she uses is that of Laura Brown, who points out that "real" trauma is often only those forms in which the dominant group can participate as victims rather than perpetrators. She goes on to analyze Morrison's novels in terms of her characters' trauma, focusing on their inability to relegate certain experiences to fully integrated memory rather than traumatic occurrence. The difference is that traumatic experiences reappear as though the event, or some version of it, is happening anew. Mains addresses both traumas which fit the standard definition and much subtler ones. Shadrack, the disturbed WWI veteran from Sula (1970), is an obvious victim of "real" trauma. While he is hospitalized, the textures of his food take him back to the experience of seeing another soldier's face destroyed; his past encroaches on his present. The trauma in Tar Baby (1980) grows throughout the characters' lives. Matus uses the various meanings of Michael's absence from the Christmas gathering as one lens through which to examine the characters' inability to process their pasts. She point out that his absence is emblematic of the book's other absences. She shows how the stories of the helpless abused child and the crusading man who refuses to come home point to every repressed memory which returns to haunt this novel's characters.

Matus's book is both a good introduction to Toni Morrison's novels and a valuable addition to the collection of any Morrison scholar. Her analyses of the novels are insightful, and the fact that the examinations build upon one another adds to their clarity for anyone who reads the entire collection. In addition, Mains provides a chronology with biographical data as well as an extensive bibliography of Morrison interviews and essays through 1996. This compact book manages cogent commentary on both Morrison's techniques and her contexts.