Home, by Toni Morrison

In her 10th novel, the great Toni Morrison presents a concise and explosive story about a brother and sister who return to a small hamlet in Georgia, both damaged but destined to find their “Home” again—the main theme and title of the novel—through revisiting the brutal violence and losses in their past.

As teenagers, both Frank and Cee (Ycidra) Money couldn’t wait to escape nowhere Lotus, Georgia, in search of a more fulfilling life, but both landed on sinking ships: He joined the recently “desegregated” army to fight in Korea, and she ran off with a fancy-pants boy from Atlanta who instantly deserted her.

Now, stranded in post-war Seattle by the post traumatic stress disorder that has landed him in a psych ward, Frank receives a cryptic note: “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.” It launches him on a journey to Atlanta to rescue Cee from a rogue doctor whose fascination with eugenics has converged with a plentiful supply of “poor people — women and girls, especially” into his discreet Buckhead clinic.

Following his escape from the hospital, Frank embarks on a cross-country train ride during which both first- and third-person narratives map out his childhood, the war years and his recent relationship, ended by paralysis and the self-loathing he’s fought since Korea, when he failed to save his two best friends’ lives.

His tale generates, in turn, the third-person stories of three other characters: Cee, married at 14; Frank’s former girlfriend, a seamstress named Lily; and his and Cee’s step grandmother, Lenore. Collectively, they flesh out Frank’s narratives, which we soon see are not telling the whole story.

At times during the book, Frank seems to be speaking to someone taking down his oral history; he challenges the writer to tackle omitted details or corrects her version: “Write about that, why don’t you?” he says, pointing to her ignorance about Korea, or his childhood homelessness before moving to Georgia, or his feelings for Lily. “I don’t think you know much about love,” he says. “Or me.”

Reviewers are torn in their verdicts on this slim volume, some citing it as an insufficient dose of Morrison’s normally rich, sprawling use of language, lacking strongly developed characters, a “novella” of little import; others lauding it as a powerful new direction, in which a trimmed-down, more muscular style drives the story home with a minimum of effort.

Granted, it’s a quick read — 145 pages that fly by in a few hours, given the force of the plot and the fast-moving narratives, making it easy for readers to skim through, overlooking the book’s elegant shape and its subtly reinforced themes, like nearly inaudible bass notes resonating beneath the repeated melody.

If Morrison doesn’t waste words, what’s here is nonetheless rich and layered, combining mythic symbols and a touch of magic realism — horses that stand upright “like men”; a bay tree split by lightning that thrives; a group of wise crones who quilt as they dispense life lessons; a small, zoot-suited ghost reminiscent of the dead child in “Beloved” who silently reappears to Frank on his voyage — with a series of brutal acts and buried bodies which remind us that for some, life in the 1950s was as dangerous at home as it was on the frozen battlefields of Korea.

This isn’t the 1954 of TV’s Madmen and “I Like Ike” buttons; throughout Frank’s train trip, he encounters the kind of dogged racism he didn’t expect to find outside of the Jim Crow South. A black couple who leave the train in Nevada to get a drink are beaten and stoned by customers in the store, and after being taken in by a friend in Chicago, Frank is frisked outside a Goodwill store. Despite the illusion of equality, his safety depends on his using Green’s book, an underground railroad of a guide to hotels and restaurants friendly to African American travelers.

But a far darker shadow of slavery’s murderous legacy flickers in “Home,” an inhumanity Morrison embodies by blurring the line between animals and human beings. African American soldiers returning from the Army are treated “like dogs. Change that. Dogs are treated better.” The doctor’s treatment of Cee recalls vivisection; and the horror that she and Frank witnessed as children — and will eventually circle back to at the book’s end — is another instance of the way men and animals are gruesomely interchangeable.

As important as finding our way home — both physical and spiritual — is how we get there, illuminated in each character: What it takes to throw off the psychic and physical displacements of the past; how to build the self-protection necessary to survive in a hostile, even killing environment; whether we're responsible for rescuing each other.

Though the journey is Frank’s, Morrison suggests that the women in “Home” hold the real key to wholeness. Lily recalls a promise she made to her parents to “let no insult or slight knock her off her ground;” Cee wishes she had not let her grandmother brand her “as an unlovable, barely tolerated ‘gutter child.’” But the healing circle formed by the old “seen-it-all” women of Lotus offer perhaps the best permanent protection and guidance of all: “They practiced what they had been taught by their mothers during the period that rich people called the Depression and they called life.”

Nobel laureate and Pulitzer prize winner Toni Morrison is now 81. She was born in Loraine, Ohio, the daughter of a Georgia sharecropper. Her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," was published in 1970; "Beloved" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.