From Journal Sentinel
May 6, 2012
Raised in a sleepy Georgia town, an 18-year-old African-American named Frank Money enlists in the Army, commits atrocities in Korea, comes home with a broken mind, returns to Georgia to rescue his sister and eventually realizes that home isn't so bad after all.
That's the potentially interesting plot to "Home," Toni Morrison's 10th novel.
The Morrison we love - whose long meditation on the intersection of race, class and gender is among the finest in American literature - would have transformed this raw stuff into a poetic parable, giving us a fresh and original look at another grim chapter of American history.
But that Morrison never moves into "Home," which is filled with stick figures trapped in a crudely didactic, clumsily symbolic and poorly structured narrative.
The catalog in "Home" of what the narrator refers to as "the slaughter that went on in the world" is extensive, joining Frank's war crimes in Korea with numerous examples of racism against African-Americans back home.
The grim tally includes the evacuation at gunpoint of a Texas community, a restrictive covenant barring a woman from buying a house, mob violence during a train ride, a trigger-happy Chicago cop shooting a child, two more Chicago cops randomly frisking passers-by, the murder of an Alabama store owner, a mugging in Atlanta, a white Atlanta doctor's eugenic experiments on Frank's sister and men forced into murderous gladiatorial contests in rural Georgia.
That's a lot of luggage for a wide-margined book of 160 pages. But Morrison stuffed just as much historical baggage into an equally tight compartment in "A Mercy" (2008), her preceding novel.
It worked there - as it had in her best novels, culminating in "Beloved" (1987) - because Morrison's allusive and poetic language fused history with myth, making us see the past anew while showing us how to move on.
In "Home," Morrison's use of symbols - including a horse, a trickster and a melon - is obvious and heavy-handed; rather than create myth, "Home" gives us lurid melodrama.
Worse, Morrison seems less interested in exploring the past than in using it as a cudgel. Instead of making literature out of history, she reduces history to easy slogans. Three of many possible examples:
"An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better."
"After Hiroshima, the musicians understood as early as anyone that Truman's bomb changed everything and only scat and bebop could say how."
"They practiced what they had been taught by their mothers during the period that rich people called the Depression and they called life."
Excepting glimpses we get of Frank in a few of his brief, first-person commentaries on the narrator's story, the characters in "Home" are as thin as this language.
Minor characters like the eugenicist doctor - "a heavyweight Confederate" who builds a bomb shelter - are either satanic sinners or perfect saints.
Major characters - including Frank, his sister and his girlfriend - at least get the benefit of whole chapters, faintly echoing Morrison's trademark polyphonic technique.
But they too are types, which means that even key relationships are reduced to implausible plot twists or explanations.
Frank tells us at one point that a never-defined "something" about his girlfriend "floored me." Less than 40 pages later, Frank discovers he is actually glad to leave her behind, because "his attachment to her was medicinal, like swallowing aspirin."
We never learn what inspires this or any of the novel's other epiphanies - including Frank's eventual realization that his hometown is actually a paradise, in which a strong-minded community of folksy and quilting women heal his sister and teach him to be a man.
It's a fairy-tale ending and a flight from history - by a writer whose best work brilliantly engages the past so that we can start building a better future.
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Sunday, May 6th 2012 at 4:27PM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
