Book review: Toni Morrison’s ‘Home,’ a restrained but powerful novel
What drags Money back to his hated home town in Georgia is dire, though vague, news about his little sister, Cee: “Come fast,” the letter said. “She be dead if you tarry.” Traveling gives him a chance to remember the lynching that drove his parents out of Texas and the loveless grandmother who reluctantly took them in. The novel’s most affecting passages involve Money’s devotion to his little sister, born in a church basement.
“Maybe his life had been preserved for Cee,” he thinks on the way home, “which was only fair since she had been his original caring-for, a selflessness without gain or emotional profit. Before she could walk he’d taken care of her. . . . The only thing he could not do for her was wipe the sorrow, or was it panic, from her eyes when he enlisted.”
(Michael Lionstar/Knopf) - Toni Morrison’s novels typically focus on women, but in “Home” she explores the problems of manhood.
Morrison’s novels have traditionally focused on women; all-female homes have been her preferred settings — “Paradise” (1997) even featured a female commune. Men in her stories are often ineffectual, or treacherous and brutal. In “Home,” a white male doctor in the suburbs is singled out as a particularly creepy fiend. He’s a modern-day version of that insidious schoolteacher in “Beloved,” a reminder of African Americans’ historically horrible relation to the science that justified their abuse from slavery to Tuskegee.
“Home” is unusual, not only in that it features a male protagonist but that it’s so fiercely focused on the problem of manhood. The novel opens with a childhood memory of horses that “stood like men.” And as Money makes his way across the country to rescue his sister, he’s haunted by what it means to be a man. “Who am I without her,” he wonders, “that underfed girl with the sad, waiting eyes?” Are acts of violence essentially masculine, or are they an abdication of manliness? Is it possible, the novel finally asks, to consider the manhood implicit in sacrifice, in laying down one’s life?
What Money eventually does to help his sister and to quiet his demons is just as surprising and quietly profound as everything else in this novel. Despite all the old horrors that Morrison faces in these pages with weary recognition, “Home” is a daringly hopeful story about the possibility of healing — or at least surviving in a shadow of peace.
Charles is The Washington Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles.
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