Morrison's novel unpacks her fictional surmise of an historical tragedy, and while doing so leaves most readers as bewildered as ever. What caused the sudden violence upon a house full of women, of black on black crime in the small town of Ruby? In a near flawless labyrinth, we realize that this is not the question we're here for.

Beneath the town and its race-divided, class-divided politics, characters pass over and through, stepping over boundaries community-shared and/or unique to an individual. Some are suppressed, some displaced. Yes, there is domestic violence here, gossip, ostracizing, and mythologized history. Town pageants are quietly re-cast; children mysteriously appear without clear parentage; a large domestic oven is the town's key symbol. After this, we enter the viewpoints of various women in turn, and each approaches the most important questions of Ruby at best tangentially. Morrison places their own concerns in the foreground, so we rarely see the contexts for them with clarity. 

It is only through a slow piling on of limited-view narratives that a collage of psychologies emerges, and these not altogether clear. Where was Mavis when . . . ? How much did Deek tell Steward when we didn't see them together, and did Steward listen? What is the core cause of the final violence? And ah, that last question has never a single unambiguous response: we can only know that in a house outside of town called The Convent live a group of women living outside of the community propriety, and in the end, their stories won't explain their ends.

For as challenging as this is for readers, the submersion into the experience, into Morrison's language, always feels more fully realized than we anticipate.