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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A New York Times Notable Book * From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: an emotional powerhouse of a novel about a modern Odysseus returning to a 1950s America mined with lethal pitfalls for an unwary Black man
When Frank Money joined the army to escape his too-small world, he left behind his cherished and fragile little sister, Cee. After the war, he journeys to his native Georgia with a renewed sense of purpose in search of his sister, but it becomes clear that their troubles began well before their wartime separation. Together, they return to their rural hometown of Lotus, where buried secrets are unearthed and where Frank learns at last what it means to be a man, what it takes to heal, and--above all--what it means to come home.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winner Morrison's immaculate new novel (after A Mercy), Frank Money returns from the horrors of the Korean War to an America that's just as poor and just as racist as the country he fled. Frank's only remaining connection to home is his troubled younger sister, Cee, "the first person [he] ever took responsibility for," but he doesn't know where she is. In the opening pages of the book, he receives a letter from a friend of Cee's stating, "Come fast. She be dead if you tarry." Thus begins his quest to save his sister-and to find peace in a town he loathed as a child: Lotus, Ga., the "worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield." Told in alternating third- and first-person narration, with Frank advising and, from time to time, correcting the person writing down his life story, the novel's opening scene describes horses mating, "[t]heir raised hooves crashing and striking, their manes tossing back from wild white eyes," as one field over, the bodies of African-American men who were forced to fight to the death are buried: "...whatever you think and whatever you write down, know this: I really forgot about the burial. I only remembered the horses. They were so beautiful. So brutal." Beautiful, brutal, as is Morrison's perfect prose. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The Korean conflict is over, and soldier Frank Money has returned to the States with a disturbed psyche that sends him beyond anger into actually acting out his rage. From the mental ward in which he has been incarcerated for an incident he can't even remember, he determines that he must escape. He needs to get to Atlanta to attend to his gravely ill sister and take her back to their Georgia hometown of Lotus, which, although Frank realizes a return there is necessary for his sister's sake, remains a detestable place in his mind. Morrison's taut, lacerating novel observes, through the struggles of Frank to move heaven and earth to reach and save his little sister, how a damaged man can gather the fortitude to clear his mind of war's horror and face his own part in that horror, leave the long-term anger he feels toward his hometown aside, and take responsibility for his own life as well as hers. With the economical presentation of a short story, the rhythms and cadence of a poem, and the total embrace and resonance of a novel, Morrison, one of our national literary treasures, continues to marshal her considerable talents to draw a deeply moving narrative and draw in a wide range of appreciative readers. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A quarter-million print run is the surest indication that the publisher is confident that a new Morrison novel is bound to be a big hit.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Point of Return HOME By Toni Morrison. 145 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24. "Whose house is this?" The first four words of Toni Morrison's new book greet - or assail - us before the story even begins. They're from the epigraph, which quotes a song cycle written by the author some 20 years ago and therefore, it seems safe to say, not originally intended for this book, but an indication, perhaps, of how long its themes have been haunting her. And "haunting" is a fitting word for the lyric itself, in which a speaker professes to lack both recognition of and accountability for the strange, shadowy, dissembling domicile in which he finds himself. The atmosphere of alienation makes the song's final line even more uncanny: "Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?" Thus the stage is set for "Home": on the basis of its publisher's description a novel, on the basis of its length a novella, and on the basis of its stripped-down, symbol-laden plot something of an allegory. It tells the story of Frank Money, a 24-year-old Korean War veteran, as he embarks on a reluctant journey home. But where - and what - is home? Frank is already back from the fighting when we meet him, a year after being discharged from an integrated Army into a segregated homeland. Since then, he has wandered the streets of Seattle, "not totally homeless, but close." He has gambled his Army pay and lost it, worked odd jobs and lost them, lived with a girlfriend and lost her, and all the while struggled, none too successfully, against the prospect of losing his mind. The action begins with Frank literally out of action: wearing restraints in a hospital bed, faking sleep in order to avoid yet another deadening shot of morphine. Confined to the "nuthouse" by the police for an infraction he can't remember, he plans and quickly executes his escape: first through the fire exit, thence to Zion - the A.M.E. Zion church, that is, whose sign he spotted earlier from the squad car. There he's given shelter by Reverend Locke (the first in a succession of "locks" that, one way or another, fit Frank's key), who helps him on his way. His destination is Lotus, Ga., which he's been avoiding because it harbors hated childhood memories - and because he dreads facing the families of the two hometown friends whose deaths in Korea plague his dreams. What draws him back now is a letter informing him that his younger sister, Cee, is in trouble. "Come fast. She be dead if you tarry." But the very notion of home is bedeviled for Frank, as is the bitter running joke of his family name. Home has never offered much solace, and the Moneys have never had much dough. At age 4, Frank was forced on foot out of his first home in Bandera County, Tex., an exodus made with 14 other families under threat by men "both hooded and not" to leave within 24 hours or die. The Moneys wound up in Lotus, "the worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield," according to Frank, to whom it appears, like its Greek counterpart, devoid of aspiration, cramped by suffocating indifference. There his parents worked 16-hour days picking cotton and planting crops, leaving Frank to protect Cee as best he could while subsisting on a daily brew of their grandparents' cruelty and neglect. There his parents died young, one of lung disease, the other of a stroke. And there, it emerges, is where Frank must return, must deliver his ailing sister, "his original caring-for," in hopes not only of saving her, but of saving himself: "Down deep inside her lived my secret picture of myself - a strong good me." What kind of selfhood is it possible to possess when we come from a spiritually impoverished home, one that fails to concede, let alone nourish, each inhabitant's worth? This is the question Morrison asks, and while exploring it through the specific circumstances of Frank Money, she raises it in a broader sense. Threaded through the story are reminders of our country's vicious inhospitality toward some of its own. On his way south, Frank makes use of a "Green Book," part of the essential series of travelers' guides for African-Americans during a more overtly racist era. On a train, he encounters fellow passengers who've been beaten and bloodied simply for trying to buy coffee from a white establishment. He meets a boy who, out playing with a cap gun, was shot by a policeman and lost the use of one arm. Frank is himself subjected to a random stop-and-frisk outside a shoe store. Even his lapses in sanity - what today we'd call symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder - are presented within the metaphor of race. He has frightening episodes of colorblindness, in which "the world became a black-and-white movie screen." Questions about Frank's mental stability emerge at every level of the narrative. His ex-girlfriend thinks of him as a "tilted man." We hear his own voice in short italicized chapters occasionally advising, correcting and rebuking the omniscient narrator. Are these signs that he's regaining psychic integrity, a sense of self-authorship, or are they evidence of his further disintegration? Even as he begins to shed his hallucinations and shoulder responsibility, he worries that he may yet be rendered helpless, "imprisoned in his own strivings." When self-preservation demands renouncing dreams, acting on behalf of one's desire is inherently dangerous. AND then there's that guy in the zoot suit. Small in stature, clad in pale blue balloon trousers, widebrimmed hat, pointy shoes - the whole shebang - this silent fellow first turns up, to Frank's amusement, sitting next to him on the train. Later, less amusingly, he appears at Frank's bedside, then vanishes before his eyes. We assume he's a manifestation of Frank's precarious mental state, a symbol of his shaky grip on his own sense of manhood, as though Frank is compensating for his feelings of degradation by inventing a model of exaggerated visibility. We operate on this belief until the final pages, when the blue-clad man reappears with a twist I won't give away, except to say that it recasts our assumptions and deftly underscores the book's most powerful proposition: that there is no such thing as individual pathology. At times, "Home" displays its meanings with all the subtlety of a zoot-suiter. We are told that Frank and Cee's grandmother "was the wicked witch" to their "Hansel and Gretel." Frank witnessed much carnage in Korea and, we learn, "It changed him." The women who nurse Cee with root medicine, common sense and blackberry jam "took responsibility for their lives, and for whatever, whoever else needed them." After Cee gains a measure of self-respect, her relationship with her brother changes: "She didn't need him as she had before." Such revelations read like in-text SparkNotes. The book doesn't need them. Part of Morrison's longstanding greatness resides in her ability to animate specific stories about the black experience and simultaneously speak to all experience. It's precisely by committing unreservedly to the first that she's able to transcend the circumscribed audience it might imply. This work's accomplishment lies in its considerable capacity to make us feel that we are each not only resident but coowner of, and collectively accountable for, this land we call home. A soldier who has come back from the Korean War fears being 'imprisoned in his own strivings.' Leah Hager Cohen is the author of four novels, including most recently "The Grief of Others," and four books of nonfiction.
Guardian Review
Reviewing Toni Morrison's last novel, A Mercy (2008), in the New Yorker, John Updike referred to it as "another instalment of her noble and necessary fictional project of exposing the infamies of slavery and the hardships of being African-American". The nobility and necessity of the enterprise does not quite offset the sense of weariness that comes from that "another instalment", and Updike had a point: exposure of infamies and hardship is a fairly limited artistic ambition. At Morrison's best, in novels such as Beloved (1987) and Song of Solomon (1977), she did much more than expose: she sang, excoriated, harrowed, educated, mythologised and uplifted. It has been 42 years since the publication of The Bluest Eye (1970), her groundbreaking first novel about self-hatred and incestuous rape in the black community. But after nearly half a century, denouncing brutality becomes a fairly circular enterprise. The instalment plan can turn history into a warehouse of horrors: which abuse shall we summon next, which barbarity shall we recount? It is not that novelists should shy away from historical trauma, far from it: but their job is to find something interesting to say about evil, rather than simply announcing its existence, being outraged, and going home. There is no dearth of possibilities, after all: as a species we are deficient in many ways, but we have a talent for atrocity. Generational legacies, hauntings, ghosts, and the persistent effects of racism and sexism are Morrison's enduring themes: they are big ones. But her novels about them are getting smaller, in every sense; she seems to be losing patience with her own stories. Over the years Morrison's settings have also become increasingly historical, as her novels grow closer to fables: A Mercy went the farthest afield historically, travelling back to the 16th century to tell a revisionist version of the founding of America. Beloved is set in Ohio and Kentucky during the antebellum days of plantation slavery. Many of Morrison's novels range across the 20th century to explore the lingering effects of slavery and poverty, often amid all-black communities: Sula (1973) tells of two women bound by a terrible secret, while Song of Solomon is about the need for people to take flight; Jazz (1992) played with music to tell the story of Harlem during its renaissance in the 1920s. Morrison's last novel set entirely in its contemporary moment was Tar Baby in 1981 (it is also the only one of Morrison's novels not set exclusively in America; much of its action occurs on an imaginary Caribbean island), although the cross-cutting storyline of Love (1993) does reach into the 1990s. Beloved continues to be Morrison's masterpiece, though acknowledgment is rarely made of the strong similarities between Beloved and Corregidora, a remarkable novel by Gayl Jones, which Morrison edited - some say co-wrote - when she worked at Random House in the 70s. Beloved has been followed by a catalogue of increasingly symbolic abstractions: Paradise (1997), Love (2003), A Mercy and now, Home. Morrison has always had a dangerous tendency toward allegory, and a moralising strain that at its most simplistic can be positively Aesopian. The problem with allegory is that it risks turning literature into a theme park: Take a ride on the Horror Train! Visit the Haunted Mansion of History! (As she moves into history, Morrison is also slipping increasingly into anachronism: A Mercy was riddled with them, and early in Home we are asked to believe that a man in the 1950s thinks that a "face seemed to morph into the front of a Jeep".) In Home, Morrison returns to the 50s, an era she remembers, to mine the traumatic possibilitis of the Korean war and of biological experiments on African-Americans. The two themes could have come together neatly - black soldiers were experimented upon, to America's eternal shame - but as one of Morrison's subjects has always been violence against black women, she makes the victim of medical experiments the sister of a soldier. Home tells the story of Frank Money, an African-American veteran traumatised by his experiences in the Korean war. He has been back in America for a year, but feels too violent and dislocated to go home to Georgia, where his younger sister still lives. As the novel opens, Frank finds himself restrained in a hospital, but can't remember exactly why he's there: "Just the noise. Loud. Real loud . . . Maybe I was in a fight?" He has received a mysterious letter from a woman named Sarah, telling him that he must hurry home and rescue his younger sister from some unnamed danger: "Come fast. She be dead if you tarry." So Frank breaks out of the hospital, shoeless in the dead of the winter, and begins to make his way cross-country to Georgia, relying on the kindness of strangers and trying to suppress his traumatic memories of the war as he goes. Fortunately for him, the first person he encounters is a kindly minister subtly named John Locke, who gives him $17 and helps him on his way. Morrison cross-cuts Frank's story with that of his sister, Ycidra, known as Cee, who left home at 14 with "a rat" who called himself Prince. He has since run off, and Cee finds a job as a medical assistant for a white doctor named Beauregard Scott; his housekeeper, Sarah, shows Cee his office, where, gazing in awe at titles such as The Passing of the Great Race, and Heredity, Race and Society, she innocently wonders what "eugenics" means. It is a powerful set-up, building suspense and a mounting sense of anxiety: what terrible things are going to happen to Cee, and how will Frank save her, when he can't save himself? Within this realistic framework, Morrison makes two gestures toward a more experimental sensibility. The first is the insertion of brief, italicised passages in which Frank narrates his own memories and argues with the narrator of the other sections: "Earlier you wrote about how sure I was that the beat-up man on the train to Chicago would turn around when they got home and whip the wife who tried to help him. Not true. I didn't think any such thing. What I thought was that he was proud of her but didn't want to show how proud he was to the other men on the train. I don't think you know much about love. Or me." The other is the mysterious recurrence of a ghostly little man in a pale-blue zoot suit who appears at key moments and then vanishes. Perhaps he is evoking Malcolm X (although Malcolm X was famously tall), who described in his autobiography the sky-blue zoot suit he wore on the streets of Harlem in his hustler days with his "homey" Shorty; Frank also thinks frequently of the "homeys" who went to war with him but did not return home. This is all very promising, and if Morrison had finished writing the novel she so carefully began, it might have been one of her best in years. But at well under 200 pages with wide margins, Home barely begins before it ends; just when the reader expects the story to kick in to gear, as Frank arrives back in Georgia and finds Cee, Morrison seems to lose interest. Cee's traumatic experience with the doctor is dispatched in a matter of (euphemistic) sentences; Frank simply carries her out of the doctor's house, and they head home to the small town they both hated, where a familiar group of sisterly healing women nurse Cee back to health. Morrison refuses to confront the violence she has invoked, substituting instead a few Morrisonian perorations insisting that a woman own herself ("Don't let . . . some trifling boyfriend and certainly no devil doctor decide who you are. That's slavery. Somewhere inside you is that free person I'm talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world"). Frank's post-traumatic stress disorder disappears as easily, effecting one of the least satisfying "redemptions" I can remember - and like most Americans, I am a sucker for redemption stories. Frank confesses that he is guilty of barbarity during the war - an important confession, especially given the tendency in recent American novels about the Korean war such as Chang-Rae Lee's The Surrendered and Jayne Anne Phillips's Lark and Termite to displace all the cruelty on to secondary characters, keeping protagonists pure and noble - but even as Frank realises he must not "let him[self] off the hook," Morrison does just that. Frank concludes: "The best he could hope for was time to work it loose," and we're done, with the result that it is not only the character who is let off the hook. Home should be relentless, unsparing, but Morrison relents halfway through, and spares everyone - most of all herself. To order Home for pounds 8.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Sarah Churchwell Home tells the story of Frank Money, an African-American veteran traumatised by his experiences in the Korean war. He has been back in America for a year, but feels too violent and dislocated to go home to Georgia, where his younger sister still lives. As the novel opens, Frank finds himself restrained in a hospital, but can't remember exactly why he's there: "Just the noise. Loud. Real loud . . . Maybe I was in a fight?" He has received a mysterious letter from a woman named [Sarah Churchwell], telling him that he must hurry home and rescue his younger sister from some unnamed danger: "Come fast. She be dead if you tarry." So Frank breaks out of the hospital, shoeless in the dead of the winter, and begins to make his way cross-country to Georgia, relying on the kindness of strangers and trying to suppress his traumatic memories of the war as he goes. Fortunately for him, the first person he encounters is a kindly minister subtly named John Locke, who gives him $17 and helps him on his way. [Toni Morrison] cross-cuts Frank's story with that of his sister, Ycidra, known as Cee, who left home at 14 with "a rat" who called himself Prince. He has since run off, and Cee finds a job as a medical assistant for a white doctor named Beauregard Scott; his housekeeper, Sarah, shows Cee his office, where, gazing in awe at titles such as The Passing of the Great Race, and Heredity, Race and Society, she innocently wonders what "eugenics" means. It is a powerful set-up, building suspense and a mounting sense of anxiety: what terrible things are going to happen to Cee, and how will Frank save her, when he can't save himself? - Sarah Churchwell.
Kirkus Review
A deceptively rich and cumulatively powerful novel. At the outset, this might seem like minor Morrison (A Mercy, 2008, etc.), not only because its length is borderline novella, but because the setup seems generic. A black soldier returns from the Korean War, where he faces a rocky re-entry, succumbing to alcoholism and suffering from what would subsequently be termed PTSD. Yet perhaps, as someone tells him, his major problem is the culture to which he returns: "An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better." Ultimately, the latest from the Nobel Prizewinning novelist has something more subtle and shattering to offer than such social polemics. As the novel progresses, it becomes less specifically about the troubled soldier and as much about the sister he left behind in Georgia, who was married and deserted young, and who has fallen into the employ of a doctor whose mysterious experiments threaten her life. And, even more crucially, it's about the relationship between the brother and his younger sister, which changes significantly after his return home, as both of them undergo significant transformations. "She was a shadow for most of my life, a presence marking its own absence, or maybe mine," thinks the soldier. He discovers that "while his devotion shielded her, it did not strengthen her." As his sister is becoming a woman who can stand on her own, her brother ultimately comes to terms with dark truths and deep pain that he had attempted to numb with alcohol. Before they achieve an epiphany that is mutually redemptive, even the earlier reference to "dogs" reveals itself as more than gratuitous. A novel that illuminates truths that its characters may not be capable of articulating.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.