Like the books of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, whose influence on Morrison's art is well documented in the criticism and in her statements about her work, Paradise paints a vast canvas populated by many characters. Because Morrison is interested in portraying a community (a recurring motif in her fiction), the sheer volume of characters challenges even the most alert reader's memory. There were, after all, nine original founding families, each of which leaves a legacy of descendants who know the Founders' history and the folklore of their collective past. Moreover, each woman who comes to the Convent has a private family history, usually painful, and most have lovers or friends whom they encountered on their "road of sorrow" that led them to Oklahoma. The cast of characters is of epic proportions, so much so that a few readers have suggested that a genealogy similar to those prepared...