New Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's God Help the Child

American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s 11th novel, God Help the Child, released in 2015, set in contemporary times, explores the relationship between a financially successful, beautiful young Black woman with a haunted past and an intelligent disaffected young Black man who is equally alienated from his past. This collection of essays, edited by Morrison scholars Alice Knox Eaton, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, and Shirley A. Stave, and including essays by well-known Morrison critics Evelyn Schreiber, Mar Gallego, Susana Vega, Anissa Wardi, and Justine Tally, explores the novel’s themes and tropes through a multiplicity of critical and theoretical approaches. The first of the collection’s three sections focuses on the issue of trauma in the novel. The various essays featured here delve into the thorny topic of childhood neglect and sexual abuse, considering how the main characters carry the burden of the pain they experienced into adulthood. These essays probe the healing achieved in the novel through various approaches, all focused on arriving at an understanding of Morrison’s sense of what healthy adulthood entails. The collection’s second section considers Morrison’s narrative choices in her novel, concentrating on the formal experimentation that occurs within the text. The authors in this section reflect upon the myriad ways in which Morrison's novel relies upon intertextual play in the creation of a fictional cosmology that engages the reader on multiple levels. Essays included in the collection's final section turn attention to God Help the Child in terms of the novel's signifying relation with earlier Morrison texts, bringing into sharp focus the predominant concerns throughout Morrison's fictional canon, from her debut work of fiction, The Bluest Eye, until the present.