With Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes under her belt, Toni Morrison can be trusted to produce powerful literature, even at age 81. Home, released on May 8, is the author’s first novel since 2008, and her tenth overall. Dispensing with the supernatural elements of Beloved and Paradise, Morrison delivers a brief yet powerful account of injustice, violence, and redemption.
Home tells the story of 24-year-old Frank Money, a traumatized black Korean War veteran who returns to his childhood town of Lotus, Ga. to save his younger sister, Cee, from a sinister eugenics doctor. As in her previous nine novels, Morrison creates a protagonist forced to grapple with issues of racial inequality, personal failures, family, love, and loss. “Home” is an ambiguous concept for Frank, whose life has been marked by a series of temporary settlements. After the four-year-old Frank and his family are forcibly evicted from their house in Texas, he spends much of his childhood living with inhospitable grandparents in Lotus. Enlisting in the army becomes a way out of Georgia, but the traumas of war follow Frank back to the United States. He moves in briefly with a girlfriend, Lily, before completing a stint in a mental hospital.
The novel’s opening finds Frank shackled to a bed on the psych ward, from which he escapes after receiving an ominous letter about his younger sister: “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.” So begins Frank’s journey south, hindered by the injustices facing blacks in the 1950s, and interrupted by the veteran’s frequent battlefield flashbacks. The reader also learns about his past relationship with Lily, which places his postwar emotional distress against a domestic backdrop.
While Home is Frank’s story, Morrison also offers snippets from the perspectives of Lily, Cee, and his grandmother, Lenore. In this slim work of fiction, the author manages to create compelling characters and storylines using very little real estate. Based on a chapter that covers less than 10 pages, for example, the reader will find him- or herself rooting for Lily to realize her dream of owning a house. Short, italicized chapters interspersed throughout the book establish Frank’s shaky mental status, blurring the boundaries between imagination and reality, fiction and memory, and narrator and author.
Even with Morrison’s masterful prose operating at full-strength, however, parts of Home feel rushed. In a novel of less than 200 pages, there is simply not enough space to develop the complexities inherent in Frank, his relationship to his sister, the lingering trauma of war, and the ceaseless and infuriating injustices of the 1950s American south. At times, Morrison seems to resort to broad, sweeping statements about the course of her characters’ lives that are unsupported by the small-scale plot. We are told that Cee, Frank’s victimized younger sister, makes an extraordinary transformation from a “girl who trembled at the slightest touch of the real and vicious world,” to a “newly steady self, confident, cheerful and occupied,” but are given little evidence of either version. Similarly, Morrison makes what feels like a half-hearted attempt to humanize Frank and Cee’s abusive grandmother Lenore, offering a quick life summary followed by the assertion: “She was a profoundly unhappy woman. And, although she had married to avoid being by herself, disdain of others kept her solitary if not completely alone.” Presented with too little of Lenore to judge this characterization, the reader is left with a sense of alienation from the story.
Although its brevity ultimately prevents the novel from matching Morrison’s earlier masterpieces like Beloved and The Bluest Eye, Home features her signature lyric style and poignant portrayals of race relations. Reading Home feels like a return to quintessential Morrison, in all its poetic power.
