Home by Toni Morrison

It was so bright, brighter than he remembered.  The sun, having sucked away the blue from the sky, loitered there in a white heaven, menacing Lotus, torturing its landscape. but failing, failing, constantly failing to silence it: children still laughed, ran, shouted their games; women sang in their backyards while pinning wet sheets on clotheslines; occasionally a soprano was joined by a neighboring alto or tenor just passing by.  "Take me to the water  Take me to the water.  Take me to the water.  To be baptized."  Frank had not been on this dirt road since 1949, nor had he stepped on the wooden planks covering the rain's washed-out places.  There were no sidewalks, but every front yard and backyard sported flowers protecting vegetables from disease and predators--marigolds, nasturtiums, dahlias.  Crimson, purple, pink, and China blue.  Had these trees always been this deep, deep green?

Out on the west coast, Korean War vet Frank Money gets a note saying that his sister Cee, still in their hometown of Lotus, Georgia, is in danger.  Frank swore that he would never go back to Lotus, but his love and concern for Cee draws him back, and he embarks on a cross-country train trip to save her from the ambiguous threat.  A dissociative outburst has placed him in a psych ward, and so he goes without money (or shoes), depending on the kindness of strangers and navigating the complexities of segregation.  Back in Lotus, Cee has taken a job with a eugenicist who is using her for grotesque uterine experiments.

Frank Money has a pretty Toni Morrisonesque name, and this is a pretty Toni Morrisonesque novel.  Like Milkman's journey to his ancestral Southern home in Song of Solomon, Frank's journey is a variation on The Odyssey, and the contours are clear from the jump: Frank will finally get home, but not without facing some real weirdness on the way, and his rescue of Cee will help him reintegrate into his home and perhaps heal himself where he's been scarred by the horrors of war.  But too often Home feels like the outline of a Toni Morrison that's never been fully developed.  Its 140 pages (with big font) are too tight to really give the impression that Frank's journey home is an undertaking, rather than a mere symbol, and Morrison's penchant for giving every minor character a turn in the narrative spotlight means the two protagonists get crowded quickly to the corners.  The classic elements of her other novels are all there, the weirdnesses--Frank's vision of the world draining of color, a mysterious apparation in a zoot suit--but they hang too heavily on the slight narrative.

The most interesting thing about Home are the interstitial chapters narrated by Frank himself.  Morrison loves to play around with point of view (The Bluest Eye, in particular, shifts between first and third person), but the sudden realization that Frank is writing to the author herself is a welcome and worthy surprise.  He admits to her that the story he's writing is not quite an accurate one, that the narrative she gives of his time in war--from where, or whom?--minimizes his own culpability in the atrocities there.  That's an inspired choice, and it makes me wish there had been a more effective novel shaped around it.