In Conversation with One of America’s Greatest Writers |
A light spray on the floor-to-ceiling windows masked the downpour that was crashing down on the busy Manhattan boulevard below. The tin sky filled the room with a shy light that made the green velvet of the sofa glow. Ms. Morrison held a hand to her left hip and walked slowly to her armchair, she’d had a late night in Brooklyn, discussing her new novel God Help the Child at an art deco Jewish temple in Park Slope and, apart from my visit, would have a quiet day checking emails, watching the news and smoking occasional cigarettes. Her poise revealed a trace of her time as a dancer in college, her eyes when they locked on me were an indeterminate color, as lucent and flecked as amber, and when she finally leaned back in her armchair, her body language fell open as if to say So, what you got?
Apart from the stiff joints, everything about Ms. Morrison belied those eight-plus decades of glorious life. The mischief, the humor, the candor and curiosity of her novels are all there in her flesh. Re-reading her work on the flight from London made me see her genius anew and I remembered the fear and despair I felt when I first her discovered her books. That disturbing alchemy of beauty and brutal veracity that take you into the cobwebbed corners of the human psyche; love that might lead a mother into setting her junkie son alight, unspoken guilt that becomes as dense as a bit in the mouth, madness as a comfort and refuge.
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