Editors Reads Verdict
Sula is Morrison's most focused and formally elegant novel — 174 pages that contain more than most novels twice their length, built around a female friendship whose complexity and intensity anticipates everything subsequent fiction about women's relationships would attempt. Sula herself remains one of American fiction's most unforgettable characters.
What We Loved
- The Sula-Nel friendship is one of literature's great female relationships — complex, damaging, irreplaceable
- Sula as a character who refuses all definition is both maddening and exhilarating
- Morrison's prose is at its most economical — not a wasted sentence across 174 pages
- The Bottom community is rendered as a fully inhabited world in minimal space
Minor Drawbacks
- The novel's brevity means some threads are introduced and departed before full development
- Some readers find Sula's amorality difficult to engage with sympathetically
- The Eva Peace subplot, while extraordinary, is somewhat disconnected from the central friendship
Key Takeaways
- → Female friendship can be the central relationship of a life, with all the complexity that implies
- → Freedom claimed completely — without regard for community norms — has a cost that falls on others
- → A community needs its evil element to define itself — which is what it uses Sula for
- → Nel and Sula are two halves of a complete person, and their separation leaves both incomplete
- → Grief for a friend can be as devastating as grief for a lover, and is less culturally acknowledged
| Author | Toni Morrison |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Vintage |
| Pages | 174 |
| Published | January 1, 1973 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, American Literature |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Best For | Readers of serious literary fiction; Morrison readers moving through her catalog; those interested in female friendship as a literary subject. |
The Bottom
The Bottom — a hilltop community in Medallion, Ohio, the product of a white landowner’s trick by which freed slaves were given the less-valuable high land — is Toni Morrison’s most contained setting, and Sula is her most compressed novel. In 174 pages, she traces the friendship of Nel Wright and Sula Peace from childhood through old age, and from that friendship constructs a meditation on freedom, community, womanhood, and what one person can be to another.
Sula and Nel are introduced as children who are already complementary: Nel is careful, socially conscious, shaped by her mother’s fierce respectability; Sula is dangerously free, shaped by a grandmother who cut off her own leg for insurance money and by a house full of women who move through desire without apology. Together they form something complete. Apart — as they are for most of the novel — they are each, in different ways, unmoored.
Sula as Character
Sula Peace is one of American fiction’s great creations: a woman who refuses every definition society offers her, who returns to the Bottom as an adult in possession of a degree of personal freedom so complete it functions as its own moral system. She sleeps with white men — an act of transgression in 1930s Ohio — she sleeps with Nel’s husband, she is unsentimental about death and indifferent to community opinion. The Bottom defines itself against her: she becomes the community’s evil, the repository of everything the neighborhood displaces from itself.
Morrison’s achievement is making Sula neither a villain nor a feminist hero but something harder — a fully realized person whose freedom is real and whose damage is real and whose relationship with Nel is the truest thing in either of their lives.
The Final Reckoning
Nel’s recognition, decades after Sula’s death, of what the friendship meant — the novel’s last and most devastating line — is one of American literature’s great endings: a grief for a woman friend that is finally, explicitly, acknowledged as the central loss of a life.
Our rating: 4.3/5 — Morrison’s most economical and formally perfect novel, built around one of literature’s great female friendships and one of its most permanently disturbing characters.
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