Book review: Home

The burdens and beatitudes of the past, and how to accommodate their ghosts, inhabit the heartland of Toni Morrison’s body of work. In Home, her tenth novel, there are allusions to the American Civil War and to the cotton fields of slavery, to the Great War and to its successor, the Great Depression. Stumbling progress towards a resolution of differences is the ever-receding ambition towards which her characters frequently and painfully make skewed advances.

Here, Frank Money, “a tilted man”, a broken veteran of combat in Korea, drags his past like a wounded limb into 1950s segregated America, with its fear of Reds under the bed and rampant racism still in the bloodstream.

Who then cares if Frank’s two black buddies have died in his arms in a foreign hell? Who cares that Frank’s trauma has taken him prisoner? Back home where “everything reminded him of something loaded with pain” he is put away inside “a nuthouse” to sweat out his angst. Then comes word that Cee, his sister, the one he’d die for, is critically sick. This propels Frank’s escape on a mission of rescue back to the hated terrain of childhood: Lotus, Georgia – a man on the run in two directions: towards and away from his suffering self.

Home for Frank is where the hurt is. The novella opens with his voice addressing the “writer” of this book: “Since you’re set on telling my story … whatever you write down, know this …” It is never clear if the putative “author” is a researcher, a documentarist, or the novelist herself. Some chapters later Frank accuses him, or her, of misrepresenting him: “Not true. I didn’t think any such thing,” he says, adding damningly, “I don’t think you know much about love. Or me.”

Frank and love provide the novella with coherence and continuity. Frank’s adoration of his sister is protective, yet it makes her at once dependent and undermines her. His love for his buddies is never spoken, and his sexual passion for Lily, a decent woman who tries to save him from post-combat blues, comes close to ecstasy, yet he abandons her, taking her money, to run to Cee’s aid.

Lily, fleeting though she is, demonstrates Morrison’s power to create mysterious depth in a merely glimpsed life. Lily epitomises the grace and indomitability later encountered in the finger-gnarled, sweat-seasoned women of Frank and Cee’s much disparaged Lotus, a place of bad vibes to which in the end they are forced to return.

That return takes its time. Morrison moves Frank’s journey languidly, in snatches of first-person speech (to the note-taking writer), poetic, hypnotic, dreamy sequences that stand in striking contrast to the realistic chapters – the writer’s guesswork? – charting Frank’s childhood, incarceration, breakdown, and wartime trials.

Frank’s flashbacks, ever-haunting, boil in his guts, and eventually prompt a halting confession: “I lied to you and I lied to me,” he tells the “writer”, unveiling an incident during the war, a crime of self-loathing during which he pulls a trigger. It’s a key moment in the novel in which moral absolutes remain vibrant. Frank’s conscience lives, an intact survivor of the abuse he suffered in childhood.

The moral heart of the book is that past, and its embodiment is underpinned by religion, especially that of the powerful sisterhood to which Cee is carried dramatically by Frank in an act of terminal desperation to be cured of her near-fatal ailment. At the very end she makes the statement – both emotional and spiritual – “This (Lotus) is where I belong.”

Her sense of completion, of journey’s end, is not shared by Frank whose attempt to pacify his turmoil leads the novel towards a ritualistic conclusion that never fully explores the deep trauma at its root. Morrison shows us instead the complexity of truth, its different versions, taking time to portray Frank’s childhood through the standpoint of his loathed, “abusive” grandmother, Lenore. We are offered too a portrait of Lily, a virtually self-contained short story, and witness the painfully slow evolution of a society still too inward to face inequality and self-harm.

It is written, of course, in the weightless prose we have come to expect. Morrison leaves many narrative avenues abandoned to the reader’s speculation. What happened to Lily? Or to the doctor who poisoned Cee? And what of Frank? Will we ever know how much the writer – as he asserts – has failed to grasp?

Home

by Toni Morrison

Chatto & Windus, 147pp, £12.99