Sula

I’m not too sure whether I enjoyed Sula or not.  It’s an interesting book, certainly; Toni Morrison is a talented enough writer that her work is almost always interesting to read.   It’s just- she does like to write about poor black communities in small towns in the Deep South.  To be fair to it, this book about is set in Ohio, but it’s very similar and as I’ve read quite a lot of her over the last year or so, it’s starting to wear a bit thin.

Sula tells the story of Sula Mae Peace and her childhood friend Nel.  More accurately, it tells the story of Bottom of the Medallion- encompassing most of the history of Sula’s family; her mother Hannah and grandmother Eva, Nel’s mother, Shadrack (a man traumatised by World War One) and the place itself.  It’s a lot to pack into under 200 pages.  In short, Sula’s family is less than conventional; they lead men into extra-marital affairs and once widowed have no interest in husbands.  Nel is more traditional- at seventeen she marries while Sula leaves for the big city.  The books up with the pair ten years later, after Sula returns and is largely rejected by the town that distrusts what it doesn’t understand.

There were great themes in this book.  It’s really interesting from a feminist perspective.  Shadrack is quite simply mad, but he is assimilated into the town with relative ease- after a few years no-one pays attention to his Suicide Day ritual.  It is not so easy for them to accept the perceived eccentricity of the Peace women, though.   Upon her return, Sula becomes a social pariah she is to blame for all the ills of the town for no reason other than she is an unapologetically independent woman.  Her unnatural femininity excludes her from the town (granted it doesn’t help that she sleeps with Nel’s husband so that he leaves her) and the town becomes united in its hatred of her.  She is their witch.

The one part where the book wasn’t quite what I wanted was the ten year interval.  The gap itself works and is a necessary narrative device, but I wanted to know more about what she was up to in Cincinnati.  We find out the Sula slept with a bunch of men (some white) but other than that, the details are thin on the ground and I’d actually really of liked to read a story about a headstrong young black woman in a big city in the 1930s.  That could be a really interesting book.  Nel I care about less.  She gets married and has children.  That is not such an interesting tale.

I’ve talked myself into liking this book more than I did originally.  There are some great parts.  Sula is a character who needs to be told, “You a woman and a colored woman at that.  You can’t act like a man,” and responds, “You say I’m a woman and colored.  Ain’t that the same as being a man?”  She is years ahead of her time and is duly punished for it; but she’s a little bit awesome in the face of a life that is going to give her nothing.  Even though in the end she isn’t shown as someone to be emulated, I quite like her for her fierce independence.

I’m now on to The Fox by D.H. Lawrence.