Morrison adds another twist by mixing magical and realistic elements into her story. As a result, some readers have tried to link her writing to the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yet you could also look at Beloved as a post-colonial Turn of the Screw, only here the “extra turn” of the screw is a much larger haunting that echoes down the generations – so much so that, as Sethe sees it, nothing ever dies, and the future is often “a matter of keeping the past at bay.” In truth, echoes of many different strains of the American literary tradition – Southern Gothic, slave narratives, the macabre tales of the supernatural– can be traced in the pages of Beloved.

Not everyone has bought into the canonical status of this work. Stanley Crouch has argued that Morrison’s writing is too often interrupted by “maudlin ideological commercials” and that Beloved “reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries.” Crouch’s comments are (as so often with this critic) thought-provoking, and deserve to be part of the on-going debate and discussion surrounding this novel. On the other hand, trying to purge melodramatic and ideological elements from a book of this sort would be like trying to get the bloodshed out of a war novel, or the fight scenes out of a Jackie Chan movie. One suspects that these very elements have contributed in no small part to the success and appeal of this author.

In the final analysis, the importance of this book is no longer a matter of good or bad writing, and perhaps never was. For twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings, this is the book that spurred them into dialogues on race and gender and other thorny issues that still haunt our national debate just as the ghost of Beloved haunts Morrison’s novel. As such, this book will continue to loom large over current day American fiction. And it is testimony to the strength of the “canon” that it can (once again) make room for such an anti-canonical work, and even give it a prized place at the head of the table.