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A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction A Best Book of the Year: NPR, AV Club, St. Louis Dispatch
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, his shattered life has no purpose until he hears that Cee is in danger.
Frank is a modern Odysseus returning to a 1950s America mined with lethal pitfalls for an unwary black man. As he journeys to his native Georgia in search of Cee, 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.
Over more than 40 years, Toni Morrison has made her luminous art out of some of the darkest aspects of American history. Slavery and the human landscape that was its inheritance are the special territory of her fiction. Winner of armfuls of awards, and, in 1993, the Nobel Prize, Morrison is a writer who coaxes astonishing beauty out of pain and tragedy and an unparalleled master of memory, able to evoke the way that it deceives, doubles back, and blooms from experience. At this point, she's more than earned the right to rest on her laurels.
But if anything she has picked up the pace, with the publication of A Mercy, a tale of the 17th-century slave trade, in 2008, and now Home. This, her tenth novel, hews closer to the present than many of her previous books. Set just after the Korean War, Home is the story of a traumatized 24-year-old black veteran, Frank Money, and his younger sister, Cee. At first, it bears some striking resemblances to Sula, Morrison's 1973 novel set in a small Ohio town after World War I. Both books open with injured soldiers in a hospital, soon thrown on the mercy of others, surviving by keeping a bottle between the present and the blood- soaked past.
The parable — at a scant 150 pages, Home is austere, even for a writer who keeps it short — lays bare the hardships and vicious discrimination that are Morrison's stock in trade. As Frank travels across the country, from the Northwest to Georgia, to rescue Cee from a situation whose horrific outlines become clear only toward the end of the book, he moves through a hostile land relieved occasionally by an act of charity from another black man or woman who can scarcely afford to spare it. This is a book in which, if a train stops in a town, you know something bad is going to happen (and it does, twice).
Slavery may have been abolished nearly a century earlier, but much hasn't changed. Forced to turn to a minister for food, shoes, and a few dollars in his pocket, Frank is told that he's not the first veteran to come for help. "An integrated army is integrated misery," the man tells Frank in one of the history lessons Morrison dispenses in the first few pages. "You all go, fight, come back. They treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better." The man's wife soon chimes in, "Maybe you think up North is way different from down South. Don't believe it and don't count on it. Custom is just as real as law and can be just as dangerous."
We're being schooled, by a writer who's become a little impatient with poetic window dressings. There's history to explain. And there's horror to reveal. Morrison has never shied away from the darkness in men's souls, but in Home she's something of a depravity artist. In this brief tale, a soldier shoots the head off a little girl scavenging for food in a Korean military camp, a black woman's sexual organs are experimented upon by an "arrogant, evil" white doctor with books about eugenics on his shelves, and a father and son are forced, like dogs (that metaphor again), to fight each other to the death surrounded by white men placing eager bets on the outcome.
Morrison's fiction has spellbound us for four decades, and monstrosity has often been at the heart of her tales. Indeed, her best-known book, Beloved, the ghost story she based on a real historical figure and which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, concerns an escaped slave who cuts the throat of her toddler daughter rather than see her recaptured and returned to bondage. But even in a book as grim as Beloved, goodness and love are there, too, in liberal measure, and so is ordinary life, the canvas upon which even horrific events must be painted.
In Home, evil is omnipresent — almost cartoonishly so — and it is the fabric of everyday experience that is squeezed into the margins. As a novelist, of course, Morrison is permitted all the liberties that a nonfiction writer is not — even if her stories are rooted in history. But there's something unsettling about seeing a writer whom we've long viewed as nothing short of a national steward produce a story that drips with weary disgust, offering on nearly every page fresh evidence of human cruelty. It is difficult to avoid the feeling that Home is meant as a rebuke — of the racists who have perverted our history, yes, but of her readers, too, and, indeed, of all humanity.
Lotus, Georgia, where Morrison's characters Frank and Cee Money grew up, is both bile and balm. In the end it claims them and redeems them in a familiar story arc that is comforting but, this time, not entirely convincing. Perhaps history has turned out to be a bitterer brew than Morrison can continue to swallow.
Sarah L. Courteau is the literary editor of the Wilson Quarterly.
Reviewer: Sarah L. Courteau
Toni Morrison is the author of ten novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to A Mercy (2008). She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in New York.
Growing up in Lorain, Ohio, a milieu Jet magazine described as "mixed and sometimes hostile," Morrison experienced racism firsthand. (When she was still a toddler, her home was set on fire with her family inside.) Yet, her father instilled in her a great sense of dignity, a cultural pride that would permeate her writing. She distinguished herself in school, graduating from Howard and Cornell Universities with bachelor's and master's degrees in English; in addition to her career as a writer, she has taught at several colleges and universities, lectured widely, and worked in publishing.
Morrison made her literary debut in 1970 with The Bluest Eye, the story of a lonely 11-year-old black girl who prays that God will turn her eyes blue, in the naïve belief that this transformation will change her miserable life. As the tale unfolds, her life does change, but in ways almost too tragic and devastating to contemplate. On its publication, the book received mixed reviews; but John Leonard of The New York Times recognized the brilliance of Morrison's writing, describing her prose as "...so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry."
Over time, Morrison's talent became self-evident, and her reputation grew with each successive book. Her second novel, Sula, was nominated for a National Book Award; her third, 1977's Song of Solomon, established her as a true literary force. Shot through with the mythology and African-American folklore that informed Morrison's childhood in Ohio, this contemporary folktale is notable for its blending of supernatural and realistic elements. It was reviewed rapturously and went on win a National Book Critics Circle Award.
The culmination of Morrison's storytelling skills, and the book most often considered her masterpiece, is Beloved. Published in 1987 and inspired by an incident from history, this post-Civil War ghost story tells the story of Sethe, a former runaway slave who murdered her baby daughter rather than condemn her to a life of slavery. Now, 18 years later, Sethe and her family are haunted by the spirit of the dead child. Heartbreaking and harrowing, Beloved grapples with mythic themes of love and loss, family and freedom, grief and guilt, while excavating the tragic, shameful legacy of slavery. The novel so moved Morrison's literary peers that 48 of them signed an open letter published in The New York Times, demanding that she be recognized for this towering achievement. The book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize; and in 2006, it was selected by The New York Times as the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.
In addition to her extraordinary novels, Morrison has also written a play, short stories, a children's book, and copious nonfiction, including essays, reviews, and literary and social criticism. While she has made her name by addressing important African-American themes, her narrative power and epic sweep have won her a wide and diverse audience. She cannot be dismissed as a "black writer" any more than we can shoehorn Faulkner's fiction into "southern literature." Fittingly, she received the Nobel Prize in 1993; perhaps the true power of her impressive body of work is best summed up in the Swedish Academy's citation, which reads: "To Toni Morrison, who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."
In 1986, the first production of Morrison's sole play Dreaming Emmett was staged. The play was based on the story of Emmett Till, a black teen murdered by racists in 1955.
Morrison's prestigious status is not limited to her revered novels or her multitude of awards. She also holds a chair at Princeton University.
ONE
They rose up like men. We saw them. Like men they stood.
We shouldn’t have been anywhere near that place. Like most farmland outside Lotus, Georgia, this here one had plenty scary warning signs. The threats hung from wire mesh fences with wooden stakes every fifty or so feet. But when we saw a crawl space that some animal had dug—a coyote maybe, or a coon dog—we couldn’t resist. Just kids we were. The grass was shoulder high for her and waist high for me so, looking out for snakes, we crawled through it on our bellies. The reward was worth the harm grass juice and clouds of gnats did to our eyes, because there right in front of us, about fifty yards off, they stood like men. Their raised hooves crashing and striking, their manes tossing back from wild white eyes. They bit each other like dogs but when they stood, reared up on their hind legs, their forelegs around the withers of the other, we held our breath in wonder. One was rust-colored, the other deep black, both sunny with sweat. The neighs were not as frightening as the silence following a kick of hind legs into the lifted lips of the opponent. Nearby, colts and mares, indifferent, nibbled grass or looked away. Then it stopped. The rust-colored one dropped his head and pawed the ground while the winner loped off in an arc, nudging the mares before him.
As we elbowed back through the grass looking for the dug-out place, avoiding the line of parked trucks beyond, we lost our way. Although it took forever to re-sight the fence, neither of us panicked until we heard voices, urgent but low. I grabbed her arm and put a finger to my lips. Never lifting our heads, just peeping through the grass, we saw them pull a body from a wheelbarrow and throw it into a hole already waiting. One foot stuck up over the edge and quivered, as though it could get out, as though with a little effort it could break through the dirt being shoveled in. We could not see the faces of the men doing the burying, only their trousers; but we saw the edge of a spade drive the jerking foot down to join the rest of itself. When she saw that black foot with its creamy pink and mud-streaked sole being whacked into the grave, her whole body began to shake. I hugged her shoulders tight and tried to pull her trembling into my own bones because, as a brother four years older, I thought I could handle it. The men were long gone and the moon was a cantaloupe by the time we felt safe enough to disturb even one blade of grass and move on our stomachs, searching for the scooped-out part under the fence. When we got home we expected to be whipped or at least scolded for staying out so late, but the grown-ups did not notice us. Some disturbance had their attention.
Since you’re set on telling my story, 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. And they stood like men.
1. Why has Toni Morrison chosen Home for her title? In what ways is the novel about both leaving home and coming home? What does home mean for Frank, for Cee, for Lenore, for Lily?
2. The race of the characters is not specified in the novel. How does Morrison make clear which characters are black and which are white? Why might she have chosen not to identify characters explicitly by their race?
3. What is the effect of alternating between Frank’s first-person (italicized) narration and the third-person omniscient narration through which most of the story is told? What is the implied relationship between Frank and the narrator?
4. Talking about the horrors of war in Korea, Frank tells the reader: “You can’t imagine it because you weren’t there” (p. 93). Does the reader succeed in imagining it even though he or she was not there? How close to another’s experience, even those radically unlike our own, can imagination take us?
5. How has Frank’s war experience affected him? What symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder does he exhibit? In what ways does he suffer from survivor guilt?
6. In what sense can Home be understood as Frank’s confession?
7. In what very concrete ways does Cee’s lack of education hurt her? How might she have been saved from infertility had she understood the implication of the books about eugenics in Dr. Beau’s office?
8. Why do the women who heal Cee have such contempt for “the medical industry”? [p. 122]. In what ways are Frank and Cee both victims of a medical system that puts its own aims above the heath of its patients? Does Home offer an implicit critique of our own health-care system?
9. What methods do Miss Ethel Fordham and the other women use to nurse Cee back to health? Why do they feel Frank’s male energy might hinder the healing process? What larger point is Morrison making about the difference between feminine and masculine, or earth-based and industrial, ways of treating illness?
10. Frank doesn’t know “what took place during those weeks at Miss Ethel’s house surrounded by those women with seen-it-all eyes,” only that they “delivered unto him a Cee who would never again need his hand over her eyes or his arms to stop her murmuring bones” (p. 128). In what ways is Cee transformed by the treatment, and the wise counsel, that Miss Ethel gives her?
11. Both Frank and Cee were eager to leave Lotus, Georgia, and never return. Why do they find it so comforting when they do go back? What is it about the place and people that feels to Frank “both fresh and ancient, safe and demanding” (p. 132) and makes Cee declare that this is where she belongs?
12. How have Miss Ethel and the other women in her community learned not just to live with but to rise above the limitations imposed on them? What moral code do they live by?
13. Why does Frank decide to give a proper burial to the man killed for sport—and whose undignified burial Frank and Cee witnessed as children—at the end of the novel? Why would this act be emotionally important for him? Why has Morrison structured the novel so that the end mirrors the beginning?
14. The flowering lotus is a plant of extraordinary beauty, but it is rooted in the muck at the bottom of ponds. In what ways is the fictional town of lotus, Georgia, like a lotus plant?
15. Why is it important that Frank does not resort to violence against Dr. Beau? In what ways has Frank been changed by the experiences he undergoes in the novel?
16. Much has been written about racism in America. What does Home add to our understanding of the suffering blacks endured during the late 1940s and early ‘50s? What is most surprising, and distressing, about the story Morrison tells?
mshoni
Posted June 3, 2012
Toni Morrison's latest novel (or novella) is a compact tale tackling the broad subject of "home". Frank Money is a veteran returns to the US after serving in the Korean War. Like most Black soldiers of that time, he's returning to a country that could care less about his service and the trauma that he's experienced. Frank works hard at trying to achieve some level of normalcy and overcome the memories that he can't escape. He receives news that his younger sister, Cee, is in trouble and must pull himself together enough to come to her aid.
As usual, Morrison's writing is beautiful and descriptive, making even the smallest detail appear paramount to the story. It's hard to believe that a book that is only about 160 pages long could contain a wealth of storytelling. The plight of Black people in the 1950's is fully explored here: returning soldiers, travelling the country under Jim Crow laws, medical research exploitation, and much more. Morrison's incredible talent assures that no matter how many physical pages there are, her stories are always fully told.
22 out of 22 people found this review helpful.
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Posted May 23, 2012
Great read, compelling narrative, beautiful language.
8 out of 12 people found this review helpful.
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Posted July 9, 2012
As usual, Toni Morrison does not disappoint in this her latest novel. I was pulled in immediately and unable to put the book down. So engrossed I was that I actually finished it in one sitting. It is not a long novel but it backs a great deal in its pages. Absolutely loved it.
7 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 8, 2012
I had finished reading the latest novella by Toni Morrison titled "Home".
Short reading but she tells a good story. An interesting and engaging plot that provides an exciting description of the main characters. Toni Morrison's stories are getting shorter but quality of writing still exists in her fiction. The plot engaged me from the start. I had finished reading this novella in three sessions. It goes on for 105 pages or so, not a very long story. Succinct and colorful, descriptive and enticing, draws you in from the very beginning. A well spent time reading this book. The twists and turns surprise and enchant. What happens at the end? I wanted the story to go on, but the writer decided to end the story. There is nothing we can do but carry on the plot in our own minds.
6 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 14, 2012
I was excited to read this book because I had heard of Toni Morrison but had never read any of her books. While the story was good, I found it at times hard to follow. The character's names changed, as well as the setting, without me being aware. It wasn't until I read the summary at the end that I understood that. Maybe upon reading again, I would enjoy it more, but I was disappointed.
3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Posted July 7, 2012
When I read reviews, I don't want to read a book report because it ruins any chance of me buying the book. Just say what you thought about it and leave it at that. Please!
3 out of 10 people found this review helpful.
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Posted July 5, 2012
Toni Morrison is a literary genius.
"I can be miserable if I want to. You don't need to try and make it go away. It shouldn't go away. It's just as sad as it ought to be and I'm not going to hide from what's true just because it hurts." (from page 131)
Why is it so hard to write about books that are so amazing? I always seem to have this issue with my favorite books. This is definitely the case with Toni Morrison's Home. Even though the novel is shy of 200 pages, the story inside it is so artfully crafted and brilliantly executed. The varying points of view and switch between first person and third person gives the reader different versions of the 'truth'.
I've learned about eugenics in my women's studies classes. It's a horrible dark secret in American society that often gets overlooked or ignored. In a way, I am glad that Morrison decided to talk about this piece of history in her latest novel. I am disgusted that it happened, don't get me wrong, but I strongly believe in learning about any sort of discrimination. That's another reason why I admire Morrison so much. She links together all of the oppressions and shows how racism exists right along with sexism and classism. The voices of minorities have always been silenced, and there is great power in learning from the past. The other choice is to ignore it, but what does that do to a person?
Frank is a perfect example of this. He may not be a perfect person, a perfect brother or boyfriend, but he is still human. He tries to ignore the past and it just haunts him and pulls him into a downward spiral. His post-traumatic stress is clear through his hallucinations and 'abnormal' reactions. When he finally says the truth, though, he is freed from that poisonous denial.
I can't recommend this novel highly enough. If you love happy, care-free novels, then this isn't for you. You might say it's too depressing, too dark, too somber. But to her fans (like me) it is empowering and hopeful. The message here is really strong and inspiring. Nobody should make you feel like you're worth nothing. You might get discriminated against because of the color of your skin, or your gender, or the lack of money in your pockets, but those oppressors aren't better than you. No one is better than you. It takes a lot of courage to see that and accept it, but it's true.
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 11, 2012
* sits down*
1 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 12, 2012
1 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
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Posted May 12, 2013
Cries hungry
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Posted May 7, 2013
"I am so not a baby. I found one though!" A girl with red streaked blond hair and brown eyes walks in. She is wearing a plain black choker, a red tank and jeans. Black sandals encase her feet. She looks about 17. She has a bundle in her arms wrapped in bright red cloth. A baby girl ith black hair and ocean blue eyes looks up from the tiny Beanie Baby in her chubby hand.
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Posted May 7, 2013
I lean back agsinst wall looking at violet and i smile mesmarized by her beauty
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Posted April 21, 2013
Hey
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted April 21, 2013
Hi
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted April 14, 2013
Wisp settled in a corner her long white fur had soft gray patches and she had pretty green eyes with a flowing tail. She was a very pretty cat. She drifted on and off. She missed her kit Oreo.
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Posted May 9, 2013
*Flies in with a cloud.* Cloud!
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Posted April 14, 2013
Yep.
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Posted April 12, 2013
Its mean to advertise in others territories
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Posted April 12, 2013
There
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Posted April 12, 2013
Hm...ima say other one
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Overview
A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction A Best Book of the Year: NPR, AV Club, St. Louis Dispatch
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, his shattered life has no purpose until he hears that Cee is in danger.
Frank is a modern Odysseus returning to a 1950s America mined with ...