The Bluest Eye

This is my third Toni Morrison, and Beloved is still my favorite so far, but it’s clearly always going to be a good book when I pick hers up.

The main thing I’d say I didn’t enjoy as much about this book is the fact that we explore multiple character perspectives and stories. It’s almost more a collection of related short stories than a novel. I prefer sticking with a smaller cast, BUT, I will say she does a lot with each of them all the same. It’s not a shallow dip into multiple characters, you are getting right into their deepest secrets and shames.

The use of the Dick and Jane type story was striking. I don’t think I have to be all that insightful to see the contrast she’s drawing between the children’s story with the perfect little white suburban family and the lives of the Black people in the novel.

I guess in the end, Pecola’s really the protagonist even though you don’t get her perspective until the end. It feels like a lot of the story ultimately revolves around her even though she not the viewpoint most of the time.

There’s a lot of humor in this book when the focus is on the little girls. Morrison captures kid talk well. But it’s far outweighed by the really dark passages. There are a few nearer the end of the book that are pretty repulsive. It’s bizarre to read such expressive, beautiful writing describing such awful things.

Given the title, I was a little worried someone was going to poke their own eyes out. I don’t think that’s too far fetched for Morrison to write.

Trickle-down works — just not in the way the plutocrats would have you think. It works through the countless daily cruelties, microaggressions to monstrous ones, cascading down from each wounded person down to whomever is ever-so-slightly lower on the status ladder, from the weak to the weaker because you can’t lash back up so violence is displaced down to the smaller and more vulnerable. It works because there’s always someone smaller and more vulnerable, all the way down until the lowest bottommost child, and who but Morrison really cares about her anyway? It works by fostering an atmosphere so thick with resentment and bitterness that there's scarcely room for anything else, or even the awareness that there could be anything else.

This is a haunting book. Morrison writes with such tenderness; with understanding for her characters and how they got that way. No cookie-cutter heroes or villains, and it’s so much harder to judge or dismiss people with backstories. Morrison also writes so beautifully, such powerful sentences and images. It took me a long time to read because so many paragraphs begged me to read them again.