Book Club Discussion Questions
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
Love tells the story of Bill Cosey and the women who love him, fight over
him, make him miserable, and finally drive him to his grave. As the
novel begins, Mr. Cosey has long-since died under suspicious
circumstances, but his memory and his presence live on inspiring a deep
and lasting hatred between his granddaughter Christine and his widow
Heed. As youngsters, Christine and Heed were best friends until the day
Mr. Cosey decided he would take Heed, at the tender age of eleven, for
his wife. From that moment, bitterness and envy drove the friends apart,
and now they live together in an enmity so deep and so rancorous that it
seems only the death of one or both will free them from it. Mr. Cosey's
will—a handwritten note scrawled on a menu in 1965—is in dispute, as is
the ownership of the house Heed claims to own and in which Christine is
allowed to live. The struggle to verify or nullify that note drives the
women to new depths, and when a street-smart young woman named Junior
arrives to help Heed write a family history, Christine rightly senses a
deception, and their dispute takes on a deadly urgency.
But
Love is about much more than a disputed will and divided
affections. It is about love itself, in all its glorious and ruinous
incarnations, from compassion to lust, and it is about family, history,
race, gender, and all the ways these forces shape and often distort an
individual's life.
Love is also about what to make of a man like
Bill Cosey, a man who created a resort where black people were treated
with respect and could debate "death in the cities, murder in
Mississippi, and what they planned to do about it," a man who took
families off the plantation and gave them jobs, but also a man who
married an eleven-year-old child and then fell in love with a prostitute
named Celestial. He is a rich, complex character, hard to understand,
hard to condemn, hard to condone.
Written with the grace, insight, and power that have characterized her
work from
The Bluest Eye to
Beloved and
Paradise,
Love is a brilliant cautionary tale in the inimitable voice of
one of the world's literary masters.
Discussion Questions- Why has
Toni Morrison chosen Love as the title for her novel? In what
ways is the book about love? What kinds of love affect and afflict its
characters? What does the novel, taken as a whole, suggest about the
nature of love?
- The main narrative of Love is framed by and
interspersed with L's italicized reflections. Why does Morrison use this
framing device? How does it affect the way the book is read? Is L's
interpretation of events the most reliable one? From what vantage point
does she speak?
- L claims she needs "something better" than an "old folks' tale to
draw on. . . . Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good
man down" [p. 10]. Is that what Love is mainly about? Is Cosey
brought down by brazen women? Why would L think so?
- How does the author develop themes of identity and belonging throughout the narrative?
- What role does the setting play in shaping the characters' decisions and relationships?
- Discuss how the ending reframes the events of the story. Were you surprised?
Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Hyperion.
Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.
