The art of fiction: Toni Morrison

What is with Toni Morrison? The Nobel laureate returned to fray this week with Home – a typically bleak novella, according to Daisy Dunn’s review. Morrison has forged a sparkling career in grim territory. Why? Simple, she says in the interview above, the black novelists of the ‘60s were predominantly men writing ‘revolutionary books’ that offered a ‘positive, racially uplifting rhetoric’. Complacency became the enemy as prejudice waned. ‘No one’s going to remember that it wasn’t always beautiful,’ she says. So here we are, being reminded of when things and people were ugly.