Families and Manliness

I've read two powerful novels this week—they’re all about strong marriages and family relationships.

To help me prepare to teach Toni Morrison’s new novel, A Mercy. this week in English 336 as a companion piece to McCarthy’s The Road, I reread Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize novel Beloved. Sethe is a young slave whose new master allows his slaves to marry and raise a family without fear of being sold or broken apart. She and Halle marry and have four children. Unfortunately, their master dies, and they decide to run away to keep their family intact. Halle is killed, but Sethe and the children reach freedom in Ohio. When the new master tracks her and the children down, Sethe, wanting to protect her children from slavery, begins to kill her children. She is only able to kill her toddler Beloved. The novel is about the consequences of that event on her, her sons, and especially her daughter Denver. Beloved haunts their lives. It is an incredibly powerful novel—well worth the painful read. I also liked the strong male characters of Paul D and Stamp Paid--good, good men.

I also read Elizabeth Stout’s Olive Kitteridge, this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner. It is a great, great book about maturing relationships. It’s episodic which means each of the thirteen chapters reads as a separate short story, but it pulls together revealing events and characters pertaining to Olive Kitteridge and her husband Henry. Olive and Henry very much remind me of Anne Tyler characters, and the organization remind me of Sandra Benitez's A Place Where the Sea Remembers.

And I’m still reading George Q. Cannon’s The Life of the Prophet Joseph Smith. A particularly good chapter this week was titled “Manliness of Joseph.” It provided a lot of physical descriptions of him and his strength and gentleness. Also much of the chapter were impressions of the Prophet from non-LDS people who had met him. I’m so touched by Joseph’s integrity and goodness to all. He was never two-faced—he was who he was both in private and in public. He wasn’t fragmented—he was whole, complete. I know much of that is a result of refinement through trials and the Spirit, but I also assume it also results from a man who truly loved and served others.