Although not quite as technically dazzling as Morrison's previous novel, Jazz, Paradise offers a rich and multitextured narrative. As the previous discussions have indicated, the novel begins defiantly in medias res, with its climactic event, the attack on the Convent, and works its way through many layers of narrative to establish the social structure and history of Ruby as well as the personal histories of the women who become the objects of the town's scapegoating. But in no case is the narrative simply chronological. Like her predecessors Woolf and Faulkner, Morrison addresses the issue of the tyranny of history by fragmenting its appearance of an orderly chronology. Thus the narrative moves by abrupt shifts within the chapters among stories of individual characters and stories of the building of a community. Although the narrator's stance seems omniscient, it is often really limited in its focus to the scope of...