Sula

Morrison's second novel is another short, deceptively slight-looking book, set in a small black community on the fringes of an Ohio town in the inter-war years. It's not explicitly a political story, the plot is about a friendship between two women, but Morrison makes it pretty clear that everything that happens in the story is influenced and constrained by the nature of relations between white and black, male and female in that time and place. Even the settlement itself grew up where it is because the land there wasn't valuable enough to be wanted by white farmers; in a pair of frame chapters from a 1960s viewpoint, the narrator tells us that the settlement has since disappeared, not because of racial integration but because hilly land show more became attractive for suburban houses and golf courses and the black families couldn't afford to stay.

Morrison sets up the contrast between two matriarchal clans, on the one hand the Wrights, driven by the need for respectability and by Helene Wright's shame about her southern mixed-race background, and on the other the Peaces, anarchistic women who see themselves as having nothing to lose and no reason to keep to anyone else's rules. Nel Wright and Sula Peace become friends across this social divide as small children, and maintain the warm, close friendship through a number of grotesque incidents right into adulthood, until they are finally forced to recognise the depth of the ethical gap between them when Sula does something she sees as trivial and Nel as fundamental.

Morrison steers away here from the kind of stylistic flourishes that got her into trouble with critics in The bluest eye, but she goes for narrative excesses instead: there are magic-realist elements where the external world is reacting in strange ways to the actions of the characters, and many of the darker human incidents in the plot have a non-realistic, fairy-tale flavour to them, especially the climactic scene where the inhabitants of the township are led Pied-Piper style to their collective doom. She seems to be flexing her muscles and telling the critics: "Just because I'm an African-American woman, that doesn't mean I've got to restrict myself to writing social-realistic political fiction." But there's also perhaps a sense that the situation of black people in America is something that isn't adequately to be described within the confines of realistic fiction: we need this element of fairy-tale to make sense of the recent past and start to understand how it continues to affect our relations in the present. show less

To be honest, I picked this book up thinking "it's required." There are certain things that you have to read before you die, certain authors that are "required" to be a fully rounded person. At least that's what I believe. But from Steinbeck to Hurston and yes, even Shakespeare, I wasn't here for it. I read The Color of Water and Jane Eyre and I could have just as easily gone on with my life having never read either.

Sula isn't that. Sula isn't anything you're thinking but it's exactly what you need.

Sula is real characters, with their flaws and horrors and humanity on full display. Sula is who you wish you could be, who you are, who you could never be, and the person you become in certain circumstances. It is the individual, the show more community, the partner and lover and friend. It is the full scope of human relationships as well as the very minutia of what it means to be Black and a woman, but more specifically a Black woman.

For people who want a deeper look at themselves and how stories are written not as sex (rising action, climax, falling action) but as life (shit happens, y'all, and it keeps going) then this is the book for you! show less

Like most people who've earned a degree in literature in the United States since 1990, I've read Toni Morrison's "Beloved" about three times. I really like parts of that one -- mostly the bit where the characters retell their past experiences or when the author goes head-to-head with William Faulkner. Much of the rest of that book seems a bit stagy to me, though, a bit stiff.

So Sula surprised me a little. It's a much looser affair than "Beloved", and while I can't call it a happy book, necessarily, it's got more room for eccentricity and its own sort of humor. Its lens is also a bit wider than that other novel's, too. It takes place over about seventy years -- one human lifespan -- and Morrison takes as her subject the entire black show more community living in the town of Medallion, Ohio, not just Nell and Sula, the two women at the novel's center. So we hear about war veterans that didn't come back quite right and pool halls and candy stores and small-town gossip even while Morrison works out some of the themes that she'd express more fully in "Beloved." We hear a lot about the characters' houses and their bodies and the all-consuming sense of emptiness some of them contend with. I don't know if I can say that "Sula" is as successful or as ambitious as "Beloved" is: the latter is due for a re-read. But for a novel that clocks at just under two hundred pages, it feels marvelously rich and complete, and features many examples of real high-quality prose, the stuff that separates the pretenders from the contenders, when all is done. This is an astonishingly polished and impressive performance, especially considering it was just Morrison's second novel. Recommended, especially if you couldn't understand why "Beloved" got such great reviews. show less

Loved every sentence of this re-read. I remember the first time I read Sula; I went in expecting an innocent and charming story about friendship from the small talk I had heard of the book. Nothing had prepared me for the complexity in the relationship between Sula and Nel; nothing had prepared me for the force that was Sula. I remember my initial feelings towards Sula: at first fascination, then shock, then almost-loathing, later understanding and loving, and, finally, missing her when all was done.

The story opens with a short description of the setting of the book. The Bottom, a Black neighbourhood in Ohio; the irony in its name; the history of the place; its attractions. The introduction is told in a reflective and nostalgic tone. Of show more a place distant, disappearing, and being gentrified. Then the story of the people of the place begins, focus being on Nel and Sula, two friends who love and need each other in various complex ways.

Toni Morrison says in her foreword to this book:
"Outlaw women are fascinating - not always for their behaviour, but because historically women are seen as disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men. In much literature a woman's escape from male rule led to regret, misery, if not disaster. In Sula I wanted to explore the consequences of what that escape might be, on not only a conventional black society, but on female friendship. In 1969, in Queens, snatching liberty seemed compelling. Some of us thrived; some of us died. All of us had a taste."

Sula is an outlaw. A woman who lives fully for herself, with no apologies for it to the end. One of the stunning bits of dialogue from this book, the final conversation between Nel and Sula, Nel asks her what she has to show for the life she lived, to which Sula responds: "Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes in it. Which is to say, I got me." To which Nel remarks, "Lonely, ain't it?" Sula's brilliant reply: "Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely."

Re-reading this meant diving into the richness of this book all over again. The wonderful world that Morrison creates with the Bottom and its people, and the beauty of the language. show less

Toni Morrison is truly one of the best to ever do it.

Shadrack rose and returned to the cot, where he fell into the first sleep of his new life. A sleep deeper than the hospital drugs; deeper than the pits of plums, steadier than the condor's wing; more tranquil than the curve of eggs.

I mean, god damn. She drops these gem-like sentences just frequently enough to remind you of her virtuosity but not so often to clutter the text with unnecessary curlicues. Her style is effortless, beautiful, and rich.

More than anything about Sula, I admire its structure, because it's so sneaky. It seems at first like it's going to be the story of Nel and Sula and their changing relationship as they slide from girlhood into womanhood. And that's certainly show more an element, but to me that relationship is just a vehicle to tell the real story, which is the story of Medallion—the Bottom and its people, the character of that place, its seasons and traditions, its lean winters and cruel summers and strange beguiling springs. Much more than the story of a woman (or two women), this is the story of a community and how its relative stability is challenged by the grit that is Sula Peace. Morrison's emphasis on omens, communal celebration, dreams, and witchcraft feels biblical at times.

For such a short book, this has a lot to chew on. show less

Morrison's second novel is another one that I read on my own outside of college classes, and the one I remember the least. The novel is set in the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio in the Black neighborhood jokingly known as The Bottom despite being on the hilltops adjacent to the white part of town in the valley.

The main plot of the novel focuses on the friendship of two girls, Nel and Sula, growing up in the 1920s. Nel is from a stable family with rigid rules while Sula's mother and grandmother are considered unconventional and loose. Their close friendship turns on the accidental death of a child they were playing with, something they chose to keep secret.

As they grow up, they go in different directions with Nel settling into a show more conventional marriage while Sula goes away to college and is rumored to have many sexual affairs. When Sula returns after a ten year absence, she is decried as the personification of evil, and unites against her, especially when Sula sleeps with Nel's husband. Nel and Sula do reconcile by the end of the novel. A framing device set in the present day notes that The Bottom has ceased to exist and the hills have been gentrified for white peoples' home.

In Sula, Morrison tells a story of a friendship between two Black women, something unusual in fiction up to that point. She creates two fully-developed, nuanced characters in Nel and Sula. One chooses a conventional life and the other follows her own initiative but neither is judged as being the "good" or "bad" one, at least by the author. The novel also shows the deleterious effects on a community living in segregation, and the internecine squabbles among Black people between "respectability" and embracing one's own identity show less

A little masterpiece of a novel, which for many reasons, none of which are a reflection on the work, I didn't enjoy reading, even though I could see Morrison's genius, insight and brilliance all through it. I even marked a couple passages where the prose or an observation made a particular impact on me. Overall, however, I was just not moved by the lives of Sula, Nel, their families and acquaintances. I don't feel that Morrison wanted to elicit sympathy for them, and that may be where she lost me.