Toni Morrison has a little trick for judging character. She's tried it on Tiger Woods, on the Mona Lisa and - why not? - on Barack Obama, too.
"You know, he's got a very pleasant, even disarming smile," the novelist says of the incoming president, whom she endorsed in January. Then she holds up a hand, at mouth level, to show how she edits out that telegenic smile's effects.
"I do this all the time. Just look at his eyes."
What did she see? She'll get there in a moment. First, she wants to tell you what she saw in the eyes of the world's greatest golfer.
"Death," she says. There's a burst of laughter, abruptly cut off.
"He wants to win. And he will destroy all."
How about the Mona Lisa, with whom Morrison got up close and personal in the Louvre?
"Everybody talks about her smile, that little mystery," Morrison says.
"And I went over there and I did like that," she holds up her hand again "and I literally jumped back."
She lowers her voice.
"There's nothing but evil there. Pure, distilled."
The only living US winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is sitting at the kitchen table in her Manhattan apartment, a skylight silvering her braided grey hair. She's mostly talking about her latest novel, A Mercy, but the name Obama keeps coming up.
So what did she make of those smile-free presidential eyes?
"Steely. I would say steely."
Which is a good thing, she thinks, given these "interesting times".
Interesting they are. But Morrison's new book evokes an America at least as fascinating as today's. Set in the late 17th century - before race-based enslavement became such a central American institution - it serves as a thought-provoking bookend to the era we are entering.
"A Mercy was sort of pre-racial to me," Morrison explains.
And though she's not ready to call the present day post-racial, it does promise "something else, something different, a new slant on all that".
A Toni Morrison novel usually begins as a question in the author's mind. What was it with this book?
"How might it feel," comes the prompt reply, "to be a pitch-black slave girl in a time when slavery was not associated with racism? How's that?"
The notion of a bound population - whether called serfs, peasants or something else - used to be commonplace, Morrison says.
Yes, there were African slaves in North America in 1690, but the continent also was filled with white indentured servants who'd signed up for years of bondage in return for transportation and the basic necessities.
What's more, in the days before laws explicitly divided the races, "indentured servants and black slaves and free whites and free black people worked on those plantations together".
What came next, after she had her central question?
"I get the narrative and the ending. I have to know where I'm going. I don't always know how to get there."
And how did this particular narrative start?
"Well, I have this needy girl. She's going to go on a journey. By herself. Usually, guys go on journeys in narratives and the women stay home. I wanted her to go somewhere, endangering herself."
The girl is a 16-year-old slave named Florens, living on a farm in upstate New York. She's needy because her mother, or so Florens believes, has thrown her away.
Her journey is a rescue mission - her mistress is sick and asks her to track down a man who might help - but it's personal, too, because Florens is desperately in love with the man she seeks.
"You alone own me," she tells him.
She has not yet learned to look inside herself for what Morrison has called "the beloved - the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you".
How might it feel to be Florens?
As Morrison fleshed out her answer, other characters emerged. First came Jacob Vaark, Florens' owner, who accepted her from a far worse master in payment for a debt.
Morrison found Vaark's name on a ship's manifest and thought "that's lovely". The character's Dutch ancestry was a necessary result.
Next she conjured Jacob's wife, Rebekka, whose prospects in England were "servant, prostitute, wife" and who thought it a blessing when her father shipped her across the Atlantic to marry an unknown man.
Lina, a young Native American woman, gave Morrison pause.
"Oh God, now I've got to know all about these tribes," she says she thought. But she didn't, she soon realised, because Lina's people were all dead from disease.
Late in the game, a mysterious, mixed-race girl named Sorrow slipped in. Then there were Willard and Scully, white servants who began with bit parts and ended with their own chapter.
"I was so pleased with them," Morrison says, because she liked Scully's sharp insights and because the pair made clear the nature of indentured servitude.
Meanwhile, she needed to see her characters' worlds. William Cronon's 1983 study Changes in the Land showed her America before the Europeans arrived: "how tall the trees were, and the fish, the weather, the flies".
Emily Cockayne's recent Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England 1600-1770 helped her understand why the Europeans came.
• Questions of race and servitude, the search for a true self, life-shaping encounters with a new world: All that adds up to a novel that has drawn mostly raves. And there's no retirement age for writers.
Morrison (77) 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."
It was her writing that Obama talked about when he called to ask for her endorsement.
"Before I speak to you about anything else," she recalls Obama saying, "let me tell you about Song of Solomon," Morrison's breakthrough book.
Morrison had been impressed by his memoir, Dreams From My Father - filled with scenes and dialogue and reflection, she says, not just the usual "and then and then".
So they talked about writing and she told him: "You and I have a connection that way, but politically, I don't know".
She had admired Hillary Clinton for years. She had never made a presidential endorsement. Then she did.
"It really was about this thing that I dared to call wisdom," she says now.
Interesting times.
"I have to say, I wish [the late black gay American writer] Jimmy Baldwin were here," she says quietly.
"There's so many people that I wish I would just like to hear them at this point, you know?"
And what does she think her old friend's reaction to the Age of Obama might have been? She gets quieter still, as though she knows a bittersweet laugh is coming.
"I think he would be desperately, desperately in love," Toni Morrison says.
