Glenn Sumi's Reviews > Sula

Toni Morrison’s novels - allusive, poetic, with plots that are carefully, artfully constructed - take work. You can’t read them casually. But they also offer up rich rewards to those with patience.

Sula, her second novel (published in 1973), tells the story of two girls who grow up in the 1920s in a Black hillside community called the Bottom in the small town of Medallion, Ohio.

Nel Wright, as her name implies, does everything right, including get married to a nice Black man and raise children; Sula Peace, who grew up in a non-traditional household overseen by an eccentric, one-legged grandmother, is a rebel with a slightly demonic streak. Later she takes on an attitude towards men that causes the town to shun her.

As children, the two girls take part in something that’s shrouded in secrecy and shame. Only in the novel’s final pages will the truth emerge about that incident.

As with Beloved and Song Of Solomon, the two other Morrison novels I’ve read, the language is dense and poetic. This is prose that should be read aloud, savoured. In fact, I reread a couple of passages just to admire them and see how they felt in my mouth and sounded to my ears.

This might also explain why Morrison’s novels don’t adapt well to the big or little screen. They’re gorgeously written, but they don’t rely much on plot. Morrison, in her omniscient third person POV, gets into many characters’ heads (with one exception, in which we’re given a long, aria-like monologue by Nel), but that doesn’t have much momentum or drive.

Did I like this novel? Yes. I really liked the way it was structured, orienting us at the beginning of each chapter with a year, but often taking its time to tell us who or what we were going to read about.

I wish the girls’ friendship had been illustrated a bit more at the beginning. We’re mostly told that they had this great friendship; I wanted to see it evolve naturally.

But the scenes Morrison does provide - including a sequence in which the girls are being assessed by the town’s men, and one in which they’re being accosted by white boys (boy does Sula ever have a powerful way to escape this situation) - are stunning. They have to be, because Morrison refers to them later.

The theme of how women judge each other over sex and men is communicated vividly. And the uneasy social and geographical relationship between Blacks and whites is handled subtly.

It’s a novel that gains in power as it progresses. Incidents have to accrue; time has to pass; words have to be spoken; and people have to die before the full weight of the story is felt.

But Morrison delivers, and does so with admirable economy. A lesser writer would have padded out the story, made us love these characters sentimentally, but I appreciated her way of letting the reader fill in the gaps. (One exception: I wanted more, even a sentence or two, about Nel’s children.)

I look forward to reading The Bluest Eye and Tar Baby - a misfit character with that name is referenced in this book - next.

But I know I’ll need an extended, uninterrupted period of time to read and appreciate them.