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Original Essays | April 16, 2013
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Homeby Toni Morrison
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:America's most celebrated novelist, Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison extends her profound take on our history with this twentieth-century tale of redemption: a taut and tortured story about one man's desperate search for himself in a world disfigured by war.
Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits his memories from childhood and the war that have left him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he had thought he could never possess again. A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood — and his home. 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 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, '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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review:"Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is known for novels in which female protagonists struggle to wrest control of their lives from an establishment bent on their destruction. Home, by contrast, tells the story of Korean War vet Frank Money, who returns from the battlefield plagued by visions of his friends' deaths and a disturbing episode that cuts at the roots of his sexual and moral identity....Salvation awaits, however, in his tiny Georgia hometown." Tim McDonnell, Mother Jones
Review:"Home's slim spine belies a fertile narrative imbued with and embellished by Morrison's visionary scope and poetic majesty. These traits expand on her long exploration of the suffering and striving born of slavery and segregation that are unique to the history of blacks in America. Conjoined in all her stories and richly illumined are the culture, traditions, talents, and triumphs of African-Americans as well." Lisa Shea, Elle
Review:"Profound...Morrison's portrayal of Frank is vivid and intimate, her portraits of the women in his life equally masterful. Its brevity, stark prose, and small cast of characters notwithstanding, this story of a man struggling to reclaim his roots and his manhood is enormously powerful." Stephan Lee, O, The Oprah Magazine
Review:"A deceptively rich and cumulatively powerful novel." Kirkus (starred review)
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 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 cadences 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...bound to be a big hit." Brad Hooper, Booklist (starred review)
Review:"Toni Morrison doesn't have to prove anything anymore, and there's artistic freedom in that calm. Her new novel, Home, is a surprisingly unpretentious story from America's only living Nobel laureate in literature....This scarily quiet tale packs all the thundering themes Morrison has explored before. She's never been more concise, though, and that restraint demonstrates the full range of her power....Despite all the old horrors that Morrison faces in these pages with weary recognition, Home is a daringly hopeful story about the possibility of healing — or at least surviving in a shadow of peace." Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Review:"The title of [Morrison's] new novel, Home, refers to Frank Money's Georgia hometown, which lies at the end of a long, tortuous journey. Traumatized by atrocities in Korea and the Deep South of his childhood, Frank races back to save his sister from a sadistic white doctor. It's an archetypal postwar homecoming story, reminiscent of The Odyssey. But it's really about the upheavals that took Frank away from home in the first place, along with a generation of Korean War veterans and southern black migrants, during a supposedly tranquil and homey decade that was, for them, anything but." Boris Kachka, New York Magazine
Review:"Gorgeous and intense, brutal yet heartwarming...like a slingshot that wields the impact of a missile....Home is as accessible, tightly composed and visceral as anything Morrison has written....[Her] shorter, more direct sentences have the capacity to leave a reader awestruck....Devastating, deeply humane, ever-relevant." Heller McAlpin, NPR
Review:"The story of the warrior's struggle to return home is classic, but Nobel laureate Morrison imbues her tale with twists that make the journey more challenging and Frank Money's success less certain....As usual, Morrison's writing is both lyrical and earthy and, although spare, dense with hints and meaning. This is a book that can be read in one long sitting, and probably will be....[A] satisfying, emotional...textured, painful and ultimately uplifting story." Anne Neville, Buffalo News
Review:"In this slim, scathing novel, Morrison brings us another quintessentially American character struggling through another shameful moment in our nation's history....Home is as much prose poem as long-form fiction — a triumph for a beloved literary icon who proves that her talents remain in full flower. Four stars." People
Review:"Beautifully wrought...[Home] packs considerable power, because the Nobel Prize-winning author is still writing unflinchingly about the most painful human experiences. There's nothing small about the story she's told with such grace in these pages." The Oregonian
Review:"Short, swift, and luminescent....The music of Morrison's language, with its poetic oral qualities, its ability to be both past and present in one long line, requires a robust structure, a big space; a small auditorium simply does not suit it. Home, then, is...a remarkable thing: proof that Morrison is at once America's most deliberate and flexible writer. She has almost entirely retooled her style to tell a story that demands speed, brevity, the threat of a looming curtain call." The Boston Globe
Review:"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 co-owner of, and collectively accountable for, this land we call home." The New York Times Book Review
Review:"Powerful...Home, the latest novel by Toni Morrison, is almost eerie in its timeliness. Set in the 1950s, it does not evoke the martini and pinched waist nostalgia of Mad Men. Rather, it calls to mind the plight of today's veterans returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars....A hallmark of Morrison's magic is the way that her imagination engages critically with several subjects simultaneously, but Home is particularly intriguing because it also seems to be a reflection on the author's previous works....In addition to her reputation for gorgeous sentences, Morrison is known for a certain brutality in her plotting, and this wrenching novel is no exception. But Home also brims with affection and optimism." San Francisco Chronicle
Review:"Morrison writes without airs. In Home, even the most painful and devastating moments are told head-on, not prettified to make them more palatable [or] heightened to create a stronger impression. She builds trust with the reader at every step; the events may be imagined, but Morrison is speaking her truth, and we believe her. Here, as in her previous books, Morrison's characters carry their histories heavy on their backs, a burden that defines them and influences everything they do today. The past, she says repeatedly, is always with us. It can't be ignored or shunted aside because to be truly home in the present, we must confront the past." The Miami Herald
Review:"[Home] is compact, a novella really, and filled with Morrison's signature style — clear, razor-sharp, poetic writing and layered storytelling....This story isn't about taking responsibility for others. It is a tale about taking responsibility for yourself....The journey home, then, is not to a physical place. It is an internal destination that each of us must find." The Dallas Morning News
Review:"If you are familiar with Toni Morrison's work (who isn't?), you will want to read her new novella, Home, in one sitting. It will take only two or three hours, and that one sitting will help you keep in mind the story's beautiful symmetry....Home is an engaging narrative, full of surprises and profundities." Counterpunch
Review:"This haunting, slender novel is a kind of tiny Rosetta Stone to Toni Morrison's entire oeuvre. Home encapsulates all the themes that have fueled her fiction: ...the hold that time past exerts over time present, the hazards of love (and its link to leaving and loss), the possibility of redemption and transcendence. Once again we are introduced to characters who must choose between the suffocating but sustaining ethos of small-town life and the temptations and pitfalls of the wider world. Once again we are made to see the costs and consolations of caring too much — for a family member, a lover or a friend. . . . Whereas Beloved mythologized its characters' stories, lending their experiences the resonance of a symphony or an opera, Home is a lower-key chamber piece, pitched somewhere between straight-up naturalism and the world of fable....Morrison has found a new, angular voice and straight-ahead storytelling style that showcase her knowledge of her characters, and the ways in which violence and passion and regret are braided through their lives, the ways in which love and duty can redeem a blighted past." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review:"Another dazzling journey with Toni Morrison as tour guide into America's slippery psychological, cultural and political terrain. In Home, Morrison has given us another triumph of beauty and brutality both in tone, language, and characters. Like her slim volumes The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Jazz, the Nobel Laureate's tenth offering reminds you of riveting tales told by a wise stranger — not kinfolk, not on any official business — that remain with you for days — sometimes longer....Morrison proves there is no writer who can craft, shape, twist, and bend the English language quite like she can....Home calmly lays out the horrors of war, abroad and domestic, with the understanding that peace is sometimes negotiable." Essence magazine
About the AuthorToni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Princeton University. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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