Toni Morrison's new novel Paradise—her first since winning the Nobel Prize in 1993 and becoming the patron saint of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club—is a harsh, uncompromising work, very much of a piece with her previous two books. Whereas 1987's Beloved dealt with parental love and 1992's Jazz addressed romantic love, Paradise has to do with the love involved in religion and community. As with its predecessors, this assumes forms both creative and destructive, ecstatic and terrifying. The setting is rural Oklahoma, in an all-black community named Ruby. The book begins in the mid-'70s with the apparent slaughter, by the town's male citizens, of a group of women living in an abandoned mansion/convent on Ruby's outskirts, then backtracks to cover the events leading up to the tragedy. With a typically keen eye toward characters, and especially the social forces that shape them, Morrison shows how the slaughter becomes, over time, an inevitability. As usual, it's not clear what Morrison is doing until about halfway through the opaque novel; in this case, she's examining how different conceptions of social order—political, personal and religious—compete with each other. Also as usual, it's about halfway through the novel that it becomes clear she's doing it very well. If there's a weakness in Paradise, it's in the book's sheer abundance: After the tight focus of Beloved and Jazz, Paradise occasionally appears overpopulated, and the many inhabitants of Ruby and its strange satellite aren't treated with quite the intensity of some of Morrison's past creations. Consequently, Paradise occasionally lacks the visceral impact of its predecessors, though the historical sweep that takes the place of some of the more personal, psychological aspects is interesting enough to compensate for the occasional loss.