Just Finished Reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye, from 1970, is the first novel from award-winner author Toni Morrison...after reading Tar Baby I thought I'd check out some of her other works.  Morrison is masterful with her intense and intricate characterizations...it seems that no one in her stories escapes scrutiny, much of it condemnatory yet at the same time exculpatory as she unravels the reasons why many people do bad...really bad...things to other people.  The industrial belt city of Lorain, Ohio...close to Cleveland...is the setting in which the lives of two black girls, one from a strict-but-loving family and the other from a terribly broken one, are spotlighted.  Claudia and her sister Frieda live in a tightly-knit nuclear family with both parents...Claudia sees everything and everyone through skeptical and often cynical eyes, sensitive to both the racism and sexism around her.  Her friend Pecola, on the other hand, lives in a broken home with parents who physically abuse each other...the father has little-to-no moral compass in his life.  She has a brother, Sammy, who repeatedly runs away...not at all the kind of material you might see in an old '80s' TV sit-com.  Pecola believes the dogma that her own mother and the world around her has pounded into her psyche: that she is ugly, very ugly...and that those with lighter skin and blue eyes are better-looking...and generally better people than her.  If only she had blue eyes, she grows to believe, her life would be so much better!  Of course, Claudia is revolted by Pecola's perspective but loves her as a friend and tries to help her.  Through the course of the story, Morrison goes back and forth in time to explore the origins of the various cast of characters, including both girls' parents and an itinerant pseudo-preacher with his own peculiar moral hang-ups.  And moral hang-ups are something that the grownups here have in no short supply.  It all supposedly takes place in twentieth century post-Depression America, and even though Lorain is nowhere near the Jim Crow Deep South, blacks and whites are still segregated and divided, with much antagonism and distrust between the two groups.  The Bluest Eye is difficult to read, not because of the language or writing style but rather because it exposes the often sordid private lives and thoughts of people.  In this sense it steps out of an ethnocentric story about a specific demographic group and becomes universal, and although I appreciate learning about diverse people's attitudes and experiences I also look for that universal application to humanity.  We humans are indeed a pretty pathetic lot, hiding our dirty linen often in plain view of those around us while entertaining delusional self-images that greatly diverge from who we really are...and who we should be striving to become.  This book is very disturbing, but it's also very honest and intimate with its characters...looks like I'll be reading another Toni Morrison novel soon...