Sula - Toni Morrison

OK so this book says on the cover 'Oprah's Book Club' and you would be forgiven for thinking that this must mean that the book is sweet and comforting, that it involves baking and quilt making and sisterly love - right?
I've read a few of Morrison's books now and find that they are all a strange brutal mix of love, life, death, madness, poverty and the ache of everything. 'Jazz' was uncomfortable, 'Beloved' was down right wacky... they both kind of took the notions of 'good' and 'bad' and mixed them around a bit, fed them back to you in a strange combo whose flavours were unfamiliar. This one is about a town of people living up the mountains, tricked out of prime farming land in the valley by the white slave owners who gave it to them on their freedom, it's about two childhood friends, about sex and falling in love, about households of women, about black folk and white folk and seeing each other through their lenses of culture, about being a woman and how being in love affects you, about the love of children, about poverty and hope and hopelesness. And I suppose, if I really think about it, it's probably about the whole tricky notion of morality - of good and evil.

Sula is one of the childhood friends, she goes away, comes back. But it's not really about that - or not about just that - it's about everything little and big that happens in and around and before and after that.

The description of Sula's careless love for men, contrasted with the moment when she becomes hooked on one person, who then leaves her, is spine tingling. You feel her begining to see him in objects around the house, like her you want to inhale him, gobble him up; but at the same time you smell the whiff of her clinging desperation the moment he does, and like him you also want to flee. In the same vein, the account of a sexual betrayal of another character is also so real feeling you almost melt into the corner of the bathroom with her, watching dust motes twirl as your life unravels.

I also loved the description of Sula's mother who lost her husband and proceeds to sleep with al the towns men both single and married, but in a gentle, natural, almost unthinking way, as she pulls them into the pantry for fleeting, passionate, unnatached sex, without shame and without spite and without remorse. This is contrasted with Sulas sexuality and the sexuality of monogamy and the sexuality of sex workers in a very interesting way. Like this:

Everything had changed. Even the whores were better then: tough, fat, laughing women with burns on their cheeks and wit married to their meanness: or widows couched in small houses in the woods with eight children to feed and no man. These modern-day whores were pale and dull before those women. These little clothes-crazy things were always embarassed. Nasty but shamed. They didn't know what shameless was. They should have known those silvery widows in the woods who would get up from the dinner table and walk into the trees with a customer with as much embarassment as a calving mare.

Anyway, there's lots of great prose, lots of 'hmmmm, that's interesting' moments, and lots of unertainty in this book.