Sula, Toni Morrison's second novel

Sula, published in 1973, was Toni Morrison's second novel following The Bluest Eye. One inadequate way to describe it is to say it is the account of the short life of a black woman in a small Ohio city in the 1920s and 1930s.

Of course to read it that way is akin to looking at Michelangelo's Last Supper as a bunch if guys having dinner. You miss everything that makes Sula an exceptional work of literary art.

The novel is set in Meridian, a small, fictional a Ohio town. As far as I know it is not a stand-in for Lorain, Ohio, where Morrison grew up. Meridian has a river and a small black community that lives on one of the hills that surround town. In one of the book's many ironies, the neighborhood it called the Bottom.

Morrison convincingly evokes black life in the 20s and 30s. We read about Sula's grandmother, her mother, and her best friend Nel. One of the many pleasures of the novel is reading about the girls' friendship although they are very different people. Sula's home life is chotic; Nel's is relatively stable. Nel marries; Sula does not (apparently).

I do not want to say much more about Sula; the web has scores—hundreds?—of comments and guides.  I will say only that the incidents Morrison describes can be both convincing and unthinkable. It's clear that the residents of Meridian's Bottom (like all of us) are chips floating on the river of time. We both act and are acted upon. Sula and Nel and everyone else in the novel do what they have to do, be who they are. The lives Morrison captures are ordinary yet by means of her art extraordinary.