New York Times Review

Although galleys of Toni Morrison's ''Love'' herald it as a ''major new novel,'' the book is in fact one of her slighter efforts. Certainly it is more engaging than ''Paradise,'' her flatfooted and highly schematic 1998 novel, but at the same time it lacks the magic and mythic ambition of her 1987 masterpiece, ''Beloved,'' and the bravura blending of the ordinary and the fablelike that distinguished her earlier fiction. Indeed, much of ''Love'' reads like an awkward retread of ''Sula'' and ''Tar Baby'' combined: once again, we are given a story about the long relationship of two women who have known each other since childhood; once again, we are given a story about a dysfunctional family living in what was once a seeming paradise. All of Ms. Morrison's perennial themes are here: lost innocence and the hold that time past exerts over time present; the sufferings sustained by black women at the hands of black men; the fallout that social change and changing attitudes toward race can have on a small community; the possibility of redemption, if past grievances and hurts can somehow be left behind. But while there are some beautifully observed passages in this book, where the author's distinctive style (forged into something new from such disparate influences as Faulkner, Ellison, Woolf and García Márquez) takes over, the story as a whole reads like a gothic soap opera, peopled by scheming, bitter women and selfish, predatory men: women engaged in cartoon-violent catfights; men catting around and going to cathouses.

…In Ms. Morrison's finest work, these same issues are dramatized with hallucinatory clarity and power. In this haphazard novel, they all too often sit there inertly on the page, like cumbersome subtitles to her characters' stories.

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Published: October 31, 2003

Find the complete article at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E7D91430F932A05753C1A9659C8B63&scp=1&sq=toni+morrison+love&st=nyt