LAUREATE OF DREAMS

Spotlight

Watch out for her," Denver told her ghostly sister about their mother in Beloved: "she can give you dreams." Giving us dreams has been Toni Morrison's business from the beginning, from Not Doctor Street and No Mercy Hospital and maple-syrup men with long-distance eyes to blind slaves, baby ghosts, black Medeas, and convent women shot like deer. Love, her new book from Knopf, is more such brilliant blues, in the echo chamber of a seashell. Mermaids sing of a beach resort on the Middle Atlantic coast where black people used to go to dance; of the glad-handed owner, "an ordinary man ripped, like the rest of us, by wrath and love," who traded favors with the local white pols to keep his hotel open from the Great Depression through the civil-rights era, even as he was enjoying too many women not at all wisely, including a child bride he married when she was only 11 years old; and of those antiphonal voices who were left behind in the haunted present to hate one another, dispute his will, and construe the meaning of his poisoned-foxglove passing. But like every other stealthy Morrison novel, Love has closets and cellars, bolt-holes and trapdoors and card tricks. More than "just another story to scare wicked females and correct unruly children," it is also a GrecoFreudian fairy tale about winged hands and webbed feet, bestiality and incest. Yet again, she gives us dreams.

JOHN LEONARD