Home

He came home from the war with a party in his head

A brother goes off to war, leaving his sister to fend for herself. He returns home with untreated PTSD, can't go back to the Deep South and all its memories until he gets a message that his sister is in trouble. You can go home again, you just have to be prepared to pay... as if you didn't pay to stay away.

This is, to my shame, only the second Morrison novel I've read. I read Beloved last year and was absolutely bowled over by it. According to the blurb, the novella-ish Home is "a Rosetta stone for her entire work, containing all the themes that have fueled her novels", and I can't argue with that; but as good as Home is at times, it feels like it could have used either fewer themes or more pages. There's so much cooking between the lines here; the way Morrison writes about race, gender and class, never needing to say who's what, just making it obvious with a few sharp observations, how people have learned to behave and relate. The unspeakable horror of childhood and wartime memories that have to be pushed down if you're going to live. But at 150 pages, it feels too crowded; especially towards the end, where she abandons that sharp eye to instead simply have the characters tell us their hangups, and some of it feels a bit like one of Alan Alda's Serious Episodes of MAS*H.

But damn, I need to read more Morrison. Because when she's good, she's incredible.