![]() ![]() ![]() At one time it was the most-assigned book in college syllabuses across the country. Beloved helped her to get the Oprah treatment, a famously double-edged form of recognition. A good deal of her stature stemmed from her 1988 novel Beloved, a book of such immense critical and commercial success that it threatened to overwhelm all of the writer’s other work. She deserved this status, but I confess it always bummed me out a little - her reputation for dignity obscured how wonderfully weird and playful much of her writing was. Stately and magnificent looking, in her latter decades she took on the role of literary nobility, a presence of immense dignity whose work was respected by everyone. After receiving insufficient recognition in her early career, no doubt owing in part to her gender and her race, Morrison became one of the most celebrated and awarded novelists on earth, her work earning her a National Book Award, a Pulitzer, and a Nobel Prize. Morrison is widely and rightly regarded as a titan in American fiction. For me that book is Sula, Toni Morrison’s gorgeous and challenging story of adolescent and adult rebellion, conformity, family, race, mental illness, and friendship. Perhaps the most irrational of the many irrational feelings we hold towards books is being offended that one we love is not more celebrated while simultaneously fearing that it will be discovered and thus cease to be our special thing, our perfect secret. ![]()
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