Book Review: Sula is lovely, magical, and sad. A short book, evoking a small town; it's tempting to think of it as aiming low, not trying to be too big. But like Emily Dickinson, Toni Morrison can find whole universes in the tiniest of incidents. The accumulation of small instances creates all of life and death (especially death) in our visit to Medallion, Ohio. Death filters through every page, can occur at any moment, is the only god that matters: "They did not believe death was accidental -- life might be, but death was deliberate." The two girls' friendship, Nel and Sula, is unalterably touched by death. The story occurs mostly within the black community, in black people's treatment of each other, good and bad, women and men, and coping with the trials and tribulations of their lives. Throughout there is the prophetic, the reader being told what's to come, just not how or why: "It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds."
Morrison is such a beyond-talented writer. She's like a basketball player who can make all possible shots, so now she needs to try the impossible ones. Sometimes she relies on her dizzying literary pyrotechnics, her pile-driving poetry, instead of just telling the story. Morrison describes Sula one way, but Sula acts another. Nel asks Sula why she was so cruel. Sula doesn't answer. Morrison tries to explain Sula through some of her most poetic flights of dazzlement -- beautiful, awesome words in a book full of miraculous writing, but I still didn't understand Sula (my fault, I know). Why the cruelty? "How come you did it, Sula?" Nel and I both needed to know. "I was good to you, Sula, why don't that matter?" But because of the strength of this novel, I had to just accept Sula as an inexplicably disturbing and destructive force of nature, and go on.
Morrison's black enclave of the Bottom in Medallion, Ohio, reminded me of Zora Neale Hurston's writing about the (real) African American town of Eatonville, Florida. Both create a rich history, the families, stories, residents, customs of a real community supposedly untouched by the white world outside. The Bottom also has its own magical myths and impossible legends, strongly reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Macondo, though instead of being set in the jungles of Colombia, Morrison sets her story in the jungle that is America. Whether Morrison read Garcia Marquez is immaterial, she creates her own individual vision and version of a reality inhabited by the fantastic and mythical, whether rooted in modern genres and narratives, or in wily African American folk tales, or American tall tales.
Sula has some of the most powerful, poetic writing I've ever read. At times it seems that Morrison is saying, "You think that was good? Watch me now!" Never seen to be showing off (or is she?), but always amazing, and sometimes her writing sends the reader soaring so high she fears she may never get back down. But the story has its foundation in a small town with a philosophy: "The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined ... to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance. They knew anger well but not despair." [4★]
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