Review: Sula

Picking up Sula as selection for my book club, I was excited to read my first Toni Morrison book! After all, she’s pretty legendary. I’d never heard of Sula and therefore didn’t know what to expect. While it wasn’t a page-turner or a book that I found myself thinking of throughout the day, it had some important themes and interesting tropes that lent itself to comparison with other contemporary black pieces of work.

Sula follows the friendship and journey of two best girl friends from a predominantly black neighborhood in the South from 1919 to 1965. It follows how the paths of the two girls diverge as Sula leaves town for years, loses contact with Nel and later returns after many affairs with men attending college. Nel, meanwhile, has stayed in town and become a housewife. Picking things up where they left off isn’t so feasible between the women, who though having suffered similar traumas, have different outlooks on life and ways of managing that trauma.

In Sula’s life, several of her family members have died as the result of fire, and they are not the only ones to do so in this short novel. The fire and burning theme was clear but almost too obvious. It was repeated over and over and could have been more subtle.

Sula also reminded me of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and The Color Purple (the new musical movie, which is my only point of comparison). The pacing of Sula reminded me of Do the Right Thing in that the entire time, the reader/viewer is witnessing microaggressions and traumas, but not necessarily knowing where the story is going. So initially, it feels like a slice of life story. Then all of a sudden, there’s a huge, aggressive climax (a tunnel collapse in Sula and the death of a black man in Do the Right Thing) when I realized “oh, this is what this was all leading to: absolute chaos and change, which is profound and unsettling. The setting of Sula, however, reminded me a lot of The Color Purple, and Sula, the character, reminded me of Shug Avery in Purple in that they are strong women who have the courage to leave town, have affairs and return home, not caring what anyone else thinks of them.

Again, Sula was not my favorite book, but feels like important literature about black culture and understanding.