Love-Sick

It's prize-giving season again in the land of literature: the Nobel and the Booker both dropped this month, and the National Book Award finalists have been announced. (With neither Jhumpa Lahiri nor Jonathan Lethem in the mix, Edward Jones' magisterial The Known World is the favorite to sweep a weak field.) Which reminds us that there are only two living Americans who own a Nobel Prize for Literature. One is Saul Bellow, and the other is Toni Morrison, whose first novel in five years is called Love (Knopf; 202 pages). With a title like that, you'd better have a big hunk of Swedish gold in your pocket to back it up.

Love comes at you lean and fast, like a pulp paperback. A woman named L handles the opening exposition in the foreboding tones of Rod Serling introducing a Twilight Zone episode. Picture, if you will, a broken-down beach town on a quietly nonspecific stretch of the East Coast. The town was once dominated by Cosey's Hotel and Resort, a swanky getaway with "more handsome single men per square foot than anyplace outside Atlanta." But Cosey's is now a Gothic ruin, and Bill Cosey, its handsome, charismatic playa-patriarch, is long dead.

But not forgotten. Left behind to squabble among the ashes are Cosey's former child-bride Heed and his granddaughter Christine, now old women, dwelling together in Faulknerian squalor. Why do they hate each other so much? What brought on the fall of the House of Cosey? And who (if anyone) killed Bill? Be forewarned: the story comes with some assembly required. We piece it together through the remembered narratives of the various members of the household, including Heed, Christine, L and Junior, a lusty, scheming teenage vixen "with a skirt short as underpants and no underpants at all," whom Heed hires to help out around the house. It emerges that Heed and Christine were childhood best friends but that when Cosey married Heed — she was 11 at the time — the girls were torn apart.

Love is a short novel (though the flap copy reminds us, a trifle touchily, that it's still "major") with a snazzy mystery plot, some energetic sex and flashes of witty banter. ("If this wasn't hell," Christine says of her living arrangements, "it was the lobby.") But why isn't it more fun? Partly because Morrison is so interested in the play of memory and time and point of view that readers have to do a lot of homework just to figure out what's going on. Partly because, like so many master portraitists, Morrison is drawn to ugly people, so readers spend a lot of time in the company of some very bitter, bitchy old biddies. But mostly because, for a book that comes on all hard-boiled, it gives way to some embarrassingly maudlin emotions. Let's face it: love is all fine and dandy, but we all know that hate makes for better copy.