Since 1993 Jean Wyatt has established herself as one of the most perceptive of Morrison's readers. Her latest work, Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels takes up the psychoanalytical narrative approach that is her hallmark to focus chronologically on Morrison's last six novels. Morrison's writing, Wyatt asserts, establishes the reader as “a partner in an ethical exchange with the text” (16) as it transforms his understanding of love's multifarious manifestations.

The first chapter, on Beloved (1986), rightly locates the novel as a turning point in Morrison's work. In a modality close to Barthes's “text-reading,” the reader is the cocreator of the text while the writer pushes her experiments with narrators in more and more creative directions. Morrison's statement, “All the meaning lies in the structure,” directs Wyatt's close readings and she calls upon psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Laplanche) not to probe the characters’ psyches, but to illuminate narrative techniques. Trauma and belatedness give keys to the delayed disclosures of the text and to the way affect shuttles between past and present scenes of the reading experience. Beloved, read through the lens of belatedness, explains how the differed disclosure of Sethe's infanticide enables the reader to re-vision their apprehension of maternal love. Lacan's analysis of the Fort/Da game and the concept of Nachträglichkeit help understand Sethe's relation to her child, the temporal disruptions linked to breastfeeding, and Beloved's spatial and temporal disorientation. Moreover, Wyatt relies on archival material to explore the link between Beloved and the Middle Passage, a trauma that in fine exceeds language. Yet “Beloved,” as the final word/call of the text, lays claims on present-day readers.

Jazz's aesthetics embodies how Morrison plays with different understandings of love. According to Wyatt, “the narrator is the City” (46) and follows a deterministic logic where the past directs the present. The critic posits that love is “something rogue” (228) and analyzes two of the novel's narrative clichés: passionate love ends in death and the beloved is always a “surrogate.” Wyatt further outlines the humor of the text and the analogy between Freudian “archeological explorations” of the Unconscious and Morrison's probing of African American history. The real reader outside the text is ultimately summoned to remake the story as he/she pleases.

In Paradise (1998), narrative forms echo displacement in an exploration of gender politics. Displacement is geographical, but also refers to the energy transferred from one object to the other. The men displace their anxieties about their wives onto the convent women and massacre them. The shame of race is thus displaced onto gender. Lacanian jouissance (Seminar XX) helps analyze excess as associated with women's desires and self-sufficiency. “Parable becomes parody” (80) as patriarchal control becomes extreme. Wyatt locates in the burning of Patricia's text an analog to the reader's continued disorientation, itself a mirror of the characters’ own troubles. The final responsibility of deciding whether the women are alive, or dead, rests on the reader.

Love (2003) is structured around the reader's realization that the love between two young girls is the core of the novel. Temporal disorientations are reflected in narrative displacements. The reader goes over what he/she has read back to the primal scene and registers, in this second reading, the devastation brought upon the characters’ lives. Love is about “how women buy into their own oppression” (113). The novel performs a critique of loyalty ethic and of the doctrine of racial uplift. Laplanche's reading of sexual trauma as a “foreign body within” fits Morrison's description of sexual trauma in Heed and Christine. L (for Love), “the authoritative guide to the story-world” (106), is given the last word. Yet the reclaiming of girlfriend love is anything but prescriptive.

A Mercy (2008) rests on the miscommunication between mother and daughter: Florens's quest for love is rooted in what she construes as her abandonment. Laplanche's theory of the enigmatic signifier helps understand the young woman's mangled language and her psychic disarray. Florens's words, in chapters characterized by repetition and her longing for interpretation, transfer onto the reader her failure to grasp her mother's message. Slavery makes the misunderstanding traumatic since rape pushes slave mothers to make a choice when there is no choice. Locked in the fantasy of sibling rivalry, Florens falsely believes that her mother preferred her brother. “Can you read?” is a self-addressed question. The reader in turn accesses Florens's incompletion in her stunted language.

Home (2012) is analyzed through the repression of an image – the severed hand that holds an orange – in conjunction with sisterly love. Wyatt mobilizes Freud's Uncanny to unfold the opposition between home and “not-home” as the novel's deep structure. The initial burial scene re-presents the act of repressing while Frank also represses his killing a Korean girl. Body parts are narrative markers, linked to actual eugenic experiments performed on black people. Love, Wyatt quotes Lacan (Seminar VIII), unites Frank and Cee. Frank's incestuous desire for his sister and the remanence of slavery explain the facile ending.

God Help the Child (2015) epitomizes the urgency to get to the business of loving, rather than wallowing in melancholia. Bride's superficiality derives from her mother's reducing her to her black skin. The short chapters devoted to the women are contrasted to Booker's third-person narrative in a language that directly translates feelings. Abraham and Torok's notion of the crypt illuminates Booker's inability to let go of the memory of his young brother's death while Bride's bodily regression signifies her entrapment in the subjectivity of the poor little black girl. Thanks to Queen and Rain, a child abused by her mother, Bride overcomes her own childhood trauma and recovers her full-woman body: she is carrying Booker's baby at the end of the novel.

Wyatt sees Morrison's later works as corrective; the writer turns to her earlier works to critique them and questions preconceptions, stock explanations. Yet does Morrison's oeuvre present an evolution from the “pessimism” of The Bluest Eye (1970) to an injunction to let go of trauma and leave the past at rest? Granted, Home ends with the reunion of brother and sister; God Help the Child has Bride and Booker, like Paul D and Beloved, put their stories next to each other. However, the obsession with pedophilia that creates the deep structure of God Help the Child is proof that the black child's vulnerability is still the unresolved enigma of Morrison's writing and of our reading. The Origin of Others (2017) gives further clues: Paradise (1997) has been devised as a reconfiguration of blackness. The foreign, the other as the self, the wild, are key notions to Morrison's work. Rather than revising her own work, she is simplifying, getting to the essence. An analysis of her poetry, her plays, her opera libretti, may help explain the allegorical thrust, the minimalism. The tendency to read a chronological narrative of her oeuvre deflects from a more in-depth questioning of what recurs.

Reading the mother's monologue in A Mercy as an isolated text fails to account for the fact that the act of reading is (at) the place of the missed encounter between the mother and the daughter. The reader is retrospectively placed in the role of the illiterate black man when he/she realizes that the text is addressed to him and the words that Florens engraves in the deserted house fly out (scripta volant) or/and fall to fertilize the earth. God Help the Child hints at the Atlanta child murders (1979–81). Morrison edited Toni Cade Bambara's Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), which features the mother of one of the murdered children. She also paid homage to James Baldwin, author of The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), for teaching her how to invent a language devoid of racist inflections. Moreover, millionaire businesswoman Madam C. K. Walker (1887–1919), and her daughter A'Leila Walker, may be the historical figures underpinning Bride's success in the cosmetics industry. As in her other works, Morrison weaves elements from black history and culture into her plot and characters.

To conclude, Wyatt's study is impressive for tracking what lies at the center of Morrison's output: the question of love. It tackles the complex narrative aesthetics that account for the link between African American history and the life experiences of black Americans. It stresses that Morrison's writing is deeply political, working on the reader's mind and affect to undo ideological constructs – patriarchal thinking, racial binaries, moral judgments, gender stereotypes – in and through language.