Toni Morrison Novels Ranked

Until her death last year, Toni Morrison was the greatest living American author. After her death last year, let’s just call her the greatest American author. For my money, no other writer has excavated history to capture the American experience in a way that feels as true or as potent as Morrison. And unlike her contemporaries who would also be on my GOAT shortlist (Vonnegut, Steinbeck), Dr. Morrison’s work feels unattached to its era, representative of the Civil Rights movement and Black activism of the 20th century without being bound by its immediate context. At her best, her work is truly timeless.

At her worst, her work is borderline unreadable. Morrison wrote five stone-cold knockouts, two decent works, and four books that feel like Toni Morrison knockoffs, so uninspired and self-parodic that you can hardly wrap your head around the fact that the same woman who wrote Beloved was responsible for God Help the Child. No other writer I can think of soars as high and sinks as low as Morrison, and if that doesn’t make her a quintessentially American author, I don’t know what does.

11. God Help the Child (2015)

God, help the reader. Even after decades of less-than-inspiring novels that were whittled down to seem more like outlines than actual books, God Help the Child is shockingly bad. The story starts off with a good intro chapter, but immediately devolves into a series of plot twists so unbelievable and out-of-nowhere that I couldn’t help but laugh when the main character accidentally burns down a house with her aunt inside.* (If you don’t think that’s supposed to be funny, you’re correct.) Initially titled The Wrath of Children, perhaps Morrison should have settled on Deus Ex Machina: the Novel instead. It’s disappointing that God was her last novel, especially when she could still write the hell out of an essay when she wanted to.

10. Home (2012)

For as bad as Home is, it’s still a step above God Help the Child in quality. Sure, the book feels like an outline more than a fully realized work. (It’s only 145 pages, and those pages are small, honey.) And sure, the plot twists don’t really seem real or believable. But Home at least feels more like a dip into real life than a telenovela, and the unintentional laughs are few and far between. What we have here is a boring shell of a longer novel, one that you can imagine being stretched out to 300 pages but would likely still be unrewarding. At least this version is only 145 pages.

9. Tar Baby (1981)

Toni Morrison’s first misstep as an author still has her commanding grasp of language, it’s just boring. The characters sit around talking about boring shit. The characters get up and do boring shit. And then they sit back down and talk in boring ways about the boring shit that happened. The last 50 or so pages, when Jadine and Son travel back to the States together, has some beautiful passages about Black country life, but in service of what? There’s just nothing vital enough to warrant spending time with these people, and they all seem to know it. It’s a wonder that Morrison didn’t.**

8. Love (2003)

The least-bad of Morrison’s bad novels, Love suffers the same pitfalls of her other late-period work (too short, uninteresting plot development), but betters them in both character development and language. Love feels like a spiteful little novel in the vein of Sula, focusing on bitter old ladies and the historical passions that have hardened into hatred. Where Love succeeds is in its descriptions of the seaside community, the lush romance of the flashbacks, and the relative ease with which she moves in between time periods. Where it fails is directing the promising setup to any sort of interesting conclusion. More than any of her other work from this period, this one had potential.

7. Paradise (1997)

What the hell happens in Paradise? I haven’t quite figured it out, and on most days that’s a good thing. Told through a series of flashbacks from several characters who all end up living in the same abandoned convent, Paradise is hard to follow, knotty and dense in ways that none of Morrison’s other books are. It took a couple hundred pages before I could even keep the characters straight, let alone understand how all these disparate parts fit together.*** Paradise feels designed to obfuscate, content to hide in a swampy haze that lifts just enough to offer glimpses of the story while making the reader work to connect the pieces. In this way, Paradise reminds me more of Faulkner than a traditional Morrison novel. I get the feeling I wasn’t supposed to understand the first couple hundred pages of the book, but simply read the words and soak in them until Morrison was ready to reveal her secrets at the end. That may be giving this book too much credit, but either way it fits solidly in the middle of the pack instead of higher up with her classics. 

6. A Mercy (2008)

The other “just okay” novel that exists in between her classics and her toss-offs, A Mercy is easily the best of Morrison’s late-period work, a haunting (and surprisingly educational) tale of slavery in the United States before the concept was married to race. Like her best work, A Mercy spins threads of plot through the history in ways that feel visceral and human, using metaphor deftly without the obviousness of her last works. It’s a beautiful, taut, fascinating novel that never quite reaches the highs a younger Morrison may have done with the same material. With Morrison’s other short work, you get to the end and thank your lucky stars they didn’t drag on for another hundred pages. With A Mercy, you wish she’d spent more time fleshing out this world, giving the story room to breathe so you had more time to luxuriate in its presence.  

5. Song of Solomon (1977)

Toni Morrison has written five perfect books, and Song of Solomon is one of them. The story of Milkman Dead**** growing up and looking for gold, Solomon is also one of only two Morrison novels with a male protagonist. Though she claims she wrote from a male’s perspective to get out of her comfort zone, you’d never know by the prose—it’s as assured, confident, and rich a novel as anything else from the era, and the delicacy with which Morrison treats the female characters in the book,***** even when Milkman treats them as anything but, is astonishing. There’s no real reason for this to come fifth on the list instead of first, and the same could be said of all the novels that follow.

4. The Bluest Eye (1970) ******

It’s remarkable to think that a novel this complex and emotionally damaging was a debut, and it’s even more remarkable that a novel this complex and emotionally damaging isn’t in the author’s top three works. The Bluest Eye gets a lot of attention for it’s painful subject matter (child molestation! incest! racism!) and whopper of an ending,******* but just as noteworthy is the inventiveness of perspective and structure Morrison deploys in telling the story. Everyone raves about how gorgeous Morrison’s writing was, but The Bluest Eye proves she was an technical innovator of the craft, too.

3. Jazz (1992)

Why doesn’t anybody talk about Jazz? It’s a more modern work than most of Morrison’s other classics, relishing in the rhythms and frivolity of the 1920s, but it’s also her best-written work. With language intentionally written to mirror the sounds and phrasing of jazz music, the words flow off the page with such musicality you can almost hear her singing the book to you. The technique marries the content perfectly, as Morrison casually bops and scats between narrators and plots, all centering around the murder of a young woman by her married (and much older) lover. It’s a heartbreaking work of staccato genius,******* one that deserves to be mentioned along with Beloved and Solomon in discussions of her masterpieces.

2. Beloved (1987)

I know, I know—this should be number one on the list. Blame Oprah, but it sits at number two.********* Beloved is Morrison’s grandest vision, her biggest canvas, and the crystallization of all the themes she’d explored in her first four novels. It’s beautiful and romantic and tragic and harrowing, sliding back and forth through time and perspective in ways that feel intuitive and groundbreaking, transportive to the point of feeling like an honest-to-God time machine in the way she makes you feel and breathe these characters.********** It’s a masterpiece of fiction, likely the best book written in the past 50 years, and the most essential of all Morrison’s work.

1. Sula (1973)

Beloved nabbed her the Nobel Prize, but Sula lands in this spot because of the ending, where the title character’s vengeful spirit drowns a gaggle of townspeople celebrating her death.*********** It’s totally badass, and the culmination of a tight, fascinating character study that explores dualism and friendship with a sharpness and sly cruelty unique in Morrison’s oeuvre. At the heart of this novel is Sula, kept at arm’s length from the reader, whose unscrupulous living and role as community scapegoat play an integral part in keeping life moving forward in her small town. I’ve never encountered another character like Sula before or since reading this book, nor do I necessarily want to—the distinctive shade of her mystery makes her all the more intoxicating. Other Morrison novels might make you feel more, and others will definitely teach you more, but none leave the lingering ghosts that Sula haunts with. 

Footnotes:

*There’s also a lot of weird stuff centered around child molestation in this book, but for as big and flashy and obvious as the plot twists are in this thing, I have no idea what the hell the moral is I was supposed to take away from this book. Considering how bad it is, I’m unlikely to try and excavate one upon further readings.

**I saved this book for last when reading through all of Morrison’s work, wanting to have one more “classic” book to read after slogging through her late-period work. Perhaps under other circumstances I might have ranked it higher, but the disappointment of being so bored by a novel from Morrison’s golden era made it seem even more of a letdown. 

***Part of this is due to the structure of the novel, where each chapter is narrated by a different character and some take place outside the context of the main plot of the novel, not to mention the fact that several characters change their names throughout. 

****Is there a better character name in literature than “Milkman Dead”? I can’t think of one.

*****In her best books, there’s always one passage that totally shatters my heart and sears itself into my brain forever. In Solomon, its when Milkman rats on his sister for shacking up with a neighbor, robbing her of the only joy she had in her lonely life. When she confronts him, it’s devastating.

******I can’t find the quote anywhere, but when Lars von Trier was talking about his Golden Hearts Trilogy, he said something to the effect of, “the easiest way to make your audience cry is to show them something beautiful and then destroy it.” The Bluest Eye is pretty much exactly that.

*******Spoiler alert: the baby dies and mom goes crazy.

*******The perfect passage in this book is about a goddam parrot, of all things. One character has a pet parrot who she’s trained to say “I love you”, and then in a fit ends up setting the parrot free into the wilds of NYC, where it’s ill-equipped to survive. The parrot keeps landing on the window and saying “I love you”, but doesn’t ever get back inside and eventually disappears.********

********When I was reading Jazz, I had to walk to my bus stop past a house that had a pet parrot in the window. I waved to that parrot every day for over a year until the tenants were evicted, and when I noticed the parrot was gone, I thought about the passage from Jazz and had to hide my tears from the bus driver.

*********The Oprah Effect, according to Investopedia, “refers to the boost in sales that followed an endorsement on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which aired on TV for 25 years. A recommendation from Oprah, the queen of talk shows, turned many fashion and lifestyle products into multimillion-dollar companies.” Such was not the case for the Beloved film adaptation, which starred Ms. Winfrey (all hail) and Danny Glover as leads. A box office bomb, Beloved opened at #2 behind Bride of Chucky, which allegedly led Oprah to emotionally eat 30 pounds of macaroni and cheese. Even in her selection of comfort food, Oprah reigns supreme.

**********There’s a chapter where Paul D describes having a bit put in his mouth by a slaver that put me into a full-on panic attack while I was reading it on the bus. 

***********Spoiler alert