I’m ashamed to say I’m not particularly familiar with Delaney, although I recognize in your description of him a type of nobly libertine person that one looked up to from the left in my childhood and teen years. That’s a real biting critique of The Bluest Eye though, I can’t say that I ever put the pieces together quite like that although part of it is surely that I read it and Sula back to back, with Sula annulling most of the older books fixation on purity and implied censure of difference. Soaphead Church-I agree that he is clumsy (although I also see some commonalities between him and the grotesque gnostic villains of your own first 2 novels) but on the other hand his letter to God has a delicious bitterness and power that to me sums up the greatness of the novel, even if I do agree that it probably is somewhat overrated within her oeuvre.
I’m ashamed to say I’m not particularly familiar with Delaney, although I recognize in your description of him a type of nobly libertine person that one looked up to from the left in my childhood and teen years. That’s a real biting critique of The Bluest Eye though, I can’t say that I ever put the pieces together quite like that although part of it is surely that I read it and Sula back to back, with Sula annulling most of the older books fixation on purity and implied censure of difference. Soaphead Church-I agree that he is clumsy (although I also see some commonalities between him and the grotesque gnostic villains of your own first 2 novels) but on the other hand his letter to God has a delicious bitterness and power that to me sums up the greatness of the novel, even if I do agree that it probably is somewhat overrated within her oeuvre.