Booking It: Home, by Tony Morrison

One of the many striking images in Toni Morrison’s slim but forceful novel, Home, involves three men playing scat and bebop in a small smoke-filled room. “Clearly,” the narrator writes, “there would be no musical end; the piece would stop only when a player was exhausted at last.” And though the pianist and trumpet player tire, the drummer keeps playing on and on. When the other musicians realize that the drummer has “lost control” and that the rhythm is in charge, they carry him off the stage, still moving his sticks to a beat “both intricate and silent.”

Upon seeing this, the novel’s protagonist, Frank Money, a 24-year-old African-American veteran of the Korean War, wonders if he too will be escorted away “flailing helplessly, imprisoned in his own strivings.” His worry is appropriate — Frank suffers from what appears to be a form of PTSD, which results in violent outbursts and sudden near-catatonic states. Due to one of these outbursts, Frank finds himself at the beginning of the novel in a mental hospital, without any recollection of what has happened. Flowing from that moment, the rest of the major narrative follows his escape from the hospital and journey toward Atlanta, Ga. where his sister Cee, whom he loves dearly, and who appears to be the only person he has left in the world, lies ill.

This relatively simple plot only occupies some of this book’s attention, though. Morrison divides the book into two kinds of alternating chapters. The odd chapters are written as monologues, spoken by Frank and, interestingly, addressed to the author, or whoever provides the third-person narration of the even chapters. These narrative-based sections follow at different times, Frank, his sister Cee, Lily (Frank’s ex-girlfriend), and Lenore (Cee and Frank’s self-centered and abusive grandmother). While this form is often interesting, it feels jumpy and uneven, leaving Morrison little space to fully develop any one character.

But even if the characters remain little more than sketches, the thematic connection between them is abundantly and brutally clear: terrible suffering, caused by a system built out of economic and racial inequality.

The examples of this are plentiful. For unexplained reasons, Frank’s family, along with all of their neighbors, was forced out of their home in Texas when he was four. Years later, Frank cannot even walk the streets without worrying about all of the ways in which he could be arrested: vagrancy, loitering, or simply “walking anywhere in winter without shoes.” And of course, not long after he thinks this, the police randomly search him and take what small amount of money he has with him. Lily discovers that she cannot buy a home in the neighborhood she wants to live in because the property cannot be occupied by “any person of the Ethiopian, Malay or Asiatic race.” Lenore’s first husband gets shot, and Cee can barely afford to eat. For such a slim book, the sheer amount of human suffering catalogued in here is incredible, painful and extremely difficult to read. It is a bitter and sad novel, and the events that occur within it more than justify and explain that emotion.

Though it certainly feels like the suffering of these characters experience is structural and inevitable, it never proves to be unendurable, and this rescues the book from despair.

In one of the most elegant and moving passages of the novel, the narrator writes that although the sun above Lotus, Ga., sucks “the blue from the sky” and tortures its landscape, it is  “constantly failing to silence it.”

In a way, this applies to the striking image of the drummer who keeps drumming: he does not represent helpless flailing, as Frank initially thinks, but endurance. If the characters come to understand anything at the end of this novel, it is precisely this capacity to continue living.

As far as delivering this thematic message, Morrison’s novel succeeds. But despite the power of this book, there are some problems that might be worth mentioning, if only because they might steer one away from this novel toward another Morrison masterpiece.

In comparison to her other books, the language in Home feels depleted and anemic, and that counts equally, as mentioned earlier, for the character development.

Though the novel displays a change in the characters, the lack of depth renders the changes less amazing.

This is an especially painful flaw for Home because of how moving the changes seem to be.

Recommendation: If you’re going to read Morrison, I’d suggest either Song of Solomon or Beloved.

But those are fairly long novels, so if you’re looking for something shorter, but still distinctly Morrison, then Home might not be a bad choice.