Home

Frank Money, a Korean War vet, returns home, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He does not want to return to his hometown of Lotus, Georgia, but he has no choice when he learns that his sister Cee is very ill. As he travels back, the reader learns Frank’s history, how he had always been his sister’s protector, and how he enlisted to escape the stifling atmosphere of Lotus.

Most of the book is narrated from the third person omniscient point of view, some focusing on other characters besides Frank, but the insertion of first person dramatic monologues from Frank’s viewpoint are the most revealing.

As would be expected from Morrison, the book is about racism, this time in the period between just before the end of Jim show more Crow and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. Frank is a war veteran but that doesn’t guarantee him equal treatment, even in the Northern states through which he travels.

The novel follows the classic structure of the hero’s journey. Frank leaves home, undergoes trials, gains self-knowledge through his experiences, and returns home a changed person. Frank thinks about his sister who “could know the truth, accept it,” and in the end he does that too: he accepts the truth about his heart of darkness revealed in Korea. When he returns to Lotus, his attitude has changed: “he could not believe how much he had once hated this place. Now it seemed fresh and ancient, safe and demanding.” It is as if he recognizes the symbolism of the town’s name: though its roots are usually found in the muck at the bottom of ponds, it is a beautiful flower.

In some ways the book seems an indictment of medicine as practised by men. Cee recovers because the women in her community use traditional healing practices which are sharply contrasted with patriarchal medicine epitomized by a Dr. Scott who uses women for his experiments in eugenics. “Those women with seen-it-all eyes” are the ones who “repair what an educated bandit doctor had plundered.” Frank isn’t even allowed to visit his sister because the women believe “his maleness would worsen her condition.” Cee is healed not just physically, but spiritually as well: “They delivered unto him a Cee who would never again need his hand over her eyes or his arms to stop her murmuring bones.” I love books with strong female characters, but I found the portrayal of these healers too sanctifying.

This sanctification continues with Cee. As the younger sibling, she was always the one whom Frank rescued, and he does save her from the clutches of Dr. Scott. However, Cee, after her recovery is determined that “she wanted to be the person who would never again need rescue. . . . she wanted to be the one who rescued. . . “Ironically it is her older brother whom she recues by showing him that she “was gutted, infertile, but not beaten” and he need not be either.

In the end, both Cee and Frank are like a sweet bay tree which is described as “split down the middle, beheaded, undead – spreading its arms, one to the right, one to the left.” “It looked so strong/So beautiful/Hurt right down the middle/But alive and well.” It is this affirmation of human strength in the midst of suffering that is the strongest reason to read this book. show less

“Maniac moonlight doing the work of absent stars matched his desperate frenzy, lighting his hunched shoulders and footprints left in the snow.”

Bravo! Now that’s writing! And that's the joy of reading Toni Morrison!

“Of course, she waited the nine days before naming, lest death notice fresh life and eat it.”

“He who harms the least of mine disturbs the tranquility of my mind.”

Frank is a Korean War Veteran with severe PTSD who has to go home to help his sister. And it's quite a story! And it's so beautifully written! It's one of those books that makes one sad when it's over.

“In my little-boy heart I felt heroic and I knew that if they found us or touched her I would kill.”

I LOVED the ending! Perfect!

“Here stands a man.”

Toni Morrison's Home left me feeling at once immersed in the story and voyeuristic as if I was staring in the window at secrets that weren't mine to know. Morrison's story telling once again reads like a lyrical documentation of a segment of the characters' lives. As usual she left me wanting to know what happened to Frank and Cee after life continued even as I imagined their lives following a familiar course. Morrison captures slices of life that grab our hearts and make us think about people whose circumstances may differ from our own. Home is the quintessential story of a search for life that always brings one back to one's roots. Morrison always delivers just as she does this story of family, secrets, and survival. Reading Home show more feels like taking a trip home... show less

2012. This book told some sad truths about racism, poverty, and war. And it told them in Morrison’s inimitable and beautiful way, so it was not so difficult to hear them as it might otherwise be, but the knowing of them will have to live in my bones.
(Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers, spoilers)
That white men kidnapped black people and made them fight to the death while they gambled on the outcome. That white doctors experimented on black women and sterilized them, leaving them to die when they were done with them. That men traumatized by the horrors of war, may do horrible things themselves. Her writing is so good, the horrors slip in so gently, no better way to learn the truth. This was my last Toni Morrison novel. I’ve read them all show more now. I cried when she died, because there would be no more. I will go back and reread the ones I haven’t read for a while. Beloved and Song of Solomon especially. show less

In Home, Toni Morrison tells the story of Frank Money, a Korean War veteran who embarks on an odyssey to rescue his sister Cee from a bad situation. Frank suffers from PTSD and severe guilt at having survived the war when his childhood friends did not. He has yet to reconnect with his family despite having always felt close to Cee. But then he receives a mysterious letter informing him Cee is in danger, and he is compelled to track her down.

As Frank makes his way towards Cee, his memories shed light on his experiences during the war. And at the same time, readers learn more of Cee’s story. Cee had run off with a ne'er-do-well to escape oppressive small-town family life, and when that relationship failed found work with a doctor who show more practiced eugenics. She naively submitted to his “treatments,” with disastrous consequences.

Reading Morrison’s fiction usually requires a certain willingness to go with the flow until I figure out what’s going on. But Home’s narrative is straightforward, almost mainstream in its approach. Cee’s situation was resolved in a way that was a bit too tidy. But I found her recovery, as well as Frank’s, sufficiently moving to warrant a 4-star rating. show less

He came home from the war with a party in his head

A brother goes off to war, leaving his sister to fend for herself. He returns home with untreated PTSD, can't go back to the Deep South and all its memories until he gets a message that his sister is in trouble. You can go home again, you just have to be prepared to pay... as if you didn't pay to stay away.

This is, to my shame, only the second Morrison novel I've read. I read Beloved last year and was absolutely bowled over by it. According to the blurb, the novella-ish Home is "a Rosetta stone for her entire work, containing all the themes that have fueled her novels", and I can't argue with that; but as good as Home is at times, it feels like it could have used either fewer themes or show more more pages. There's so much cooking between the lines here; the way Morrison writes about race, gender and class, never needing to say who's what, just making it obvious with a few sharp observations, how people have learned to behave and relate. The unspeakable horror of childhood and wartime memories that have to be pushed down if you're going to live. But at 150 pages, it feels too crowded; especially towards the end, where she abandons that sharp eye to instead simply have the characters tell us their hangups, and some of it feels a bit like one of Alan Alda's Serious Episodes of M*A*S*H.

But damn, I need to read more Morrison. Because when she's good, she's incredible. show less

This isn't a very long book, and it isn;t very hard to read, but it packs a punch - but it is surprisingly hard to put a finger on exactly why that is. Frank & Cee are brother & sister in the south. He escapes the deadbeat town by heading off to the Army and Korea. Cee gets into all sorts of scrapes, having always had her bog brother to look after her, she heads straight off the rails without him and ends up in a bit of a pickle.
Cee's problem gets to Frank by a letter and he duly turns up to save her. But this time he can't out it right on his own and so they return to the small town that he hated so much. As time has passed, his experience of the town is much altered, and both of them show a sense of growth as people and the show more relationship between them changes. There is not a great deal of information in here, and you don't always know what is happening, or that what you do hear is the truth. But it is a compelling read. show less