Windows to the Soulful

John Updike was less enthusiastic. In the New Yorker, he complained that it was hard to know what was happening in the opening pages. Perhaps "the pernicious influence of William Faulkner" was to blame?

Morrison shrugs this off.

"That was kind of funny. But I like being reviewed by writers," she says.

At 77, she is old enough to have acquired one of those plastic organizers that reminds you what pill to take when. She is also old enough to have discovered -- after a hospital letter informed her that "we have declined your Medicaid or Medicare or whatever because you are an illegal alien or incarcerated" -- that it's impossible to reach a human being at a Medicare phone.

"Sixty minutes' wait!" she says. "I finally had to go to a congressman, because I thought it was identity theft. And I got it straightened out, but not by doing what they tell you to do, which is call and push buttons."

The good news is, there's no retirement age for writers. Morrison has two more novels in mind already, one set in the 1950s, one in the present.

"I'm getting better," she says.

And that means?

"I get there faster. I don't have to write badly."

Chloe Ardelia Wofford (the name Morrison's parents gave her) wrote her first words on the sidewalks of Lorain, Ohio, in the mid-1930s. "My sister probably taught me. I was about 3," she recalls. Her mother and father told a lot of stories "and I lived in the library, down on the floor, because they had all the little children's books down there."

At 12, she became a Catholic and took the baptismal name Anthony, soon shortened to "Toni." She went to college at Howard, got a master's in literature from Cornell. When her brief marriage to Jamaican architect Harold Morrison ended, she was left with two young sons and a name she had no intention of putting on a book.

"I was going to be Chloe -- Chloe Wofford," she says. But in 1970, when she saw "Toni Morrison" on the galleys of her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," and said, "I don't want to use this name," she was told, "Sorry, it's already in the Library of Congress."