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** spoiler alert ** Toni Morrison’s new novel, Home, begins with two children witnessing a man being buried �� presumably alive. It’s a strong opening.

‘We could not see the faces of the men doing the burying, only their trousers; but we saw the edge of a spade drive the jerking foot down to join the rest of itself.��

But it’s also a testament to this unsubtle book’s endless litany of atrocities that by the end, I’d almost totally forgotten about the man being buried alive. Think about that for a moment: the book is a mere 145 pages long and I almost totally forgot that it began with a man being buried alive.

Oh yeah, I thought, that also happened.

That was before the war-torn protagonist, Frank Money, admits to having shot a starving Korean girl in the face; before the man being buried is revealed to have been forced to battle his son to the death in a sort of human dogfight; before an entire Texas town of African Americans was made to relocate under pain of death �� a lone hold-out has his eyes carved out �� and please, please don’t even get me started on the mad ‘heavyweight Confederate�� eugenics doctor who nearly kills a character by, one assumes, a forced sexual sterilization experiment gone wrong. That was before all the racially motivated beatings and shootings, the splattery Korean War vignettes, the gang muggings and wrestling prostitutes. Someone being buried alive? That’s nothing.

Again, Home is 145 pages long.

But the Nobel laureate's tenth novel can’t seem to help itself. If something bad can happen, it does, and then it does again, and again, until it starts to feel like one of those Hollywood blockbusters where every action sequence becomes bigger, crazier, louder, until the final city-destroying finale. There’s little time for reflection: not when Morrison wants to hit you over the head with history. You thought that was bad? Well, how about this. Boom. History repeating itself first as tragedy, then as farce, then as something so mind-numbing that you simply want it to end: and I’m not sure if it would have been a relief or totally of a piece if Godzilla himself had appeared at the end of the novel to grind all of Morrison’s woebegone characters into the Georgian dust.

Basically, Home is a pulply morality tale cruising along on a default setting of literary pretension. It concerns Frank Money, a disturbed six-foot-three-inch African American Korean War veteran and his younger sister, Ycodra, better known as Cee, who Frank has always protected: ‘Even before she could walk he’d taken care of her. The first word she spoke was ‘Fwank’�� Back from the war and prone to alcoholic derangements of a violent and too metaphorically apt nature (yes, he starts to see things in black and white before they happen), Frank embarks on a 1950s Odyssey from the west coast back home to Lotus, Georgia ‘the worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield��. Cee, he has been told, is dying.

From there we’re parceled out insights into Frank’s present and past, the present and past of his current lover, Lily, his sister, Cee, and quite a few secondary characters. It feigns towards gothic horror, war horror and social realism horror, never really finding a home in any of these genres. You can see the bones of a powerful intergenerational novel or two poking out all over the place �� but what we have is far too short, too sketchy.

The book isn’t so much inhabited by characters as case studies. Each and every one feels like an excuse for the author to make a point, to explore this or that historical tragedy, to make sure we stand witness. Each character checks off another instance of pre-Civil Rights era racism, be it the insidious bureaucratic ‘restrictions�� preventing African Americans from making their homes in certain neighborhoods, to the full scale murder of for pleasure or sport or ugly American hate. There’s just too much here and, frankly, you need more than 145 pages to create characters which can rise above the pain and torment Morrison seems to almost sadistically put them through here. It serves nobody to toss off a lurid, baffling scene at the end of a novel concerning a human dog fight, where a father and son are forced to battle each other to the death with knives while a crowd of men cheer. Especially coming not a few pages after the aforementioned confession that Frank Money murdered a small girl in Korea �� it feels exploitive, and shockingly manipulative. Morrison might have earned the right to go there with her past fiction, but not within the confines of this novel. And I haven’t even mentioned the appearance of the zoot suited ghost, which must mean something important because: well, how many ghosts wear zoot suits?
Add to this the fact that Morrison has her third-person narrative chopped up by Frank Money telling bits of his story directly to us and her, in first-person, at one point going so far as to question the book itself:

"Earlier you wrote about how sure I was that the beat-up man on the train to Chicago would turn around when they got home and whip the wife who tried to help him. Not true. I didn’t think any such thing. What I thought was that he was proud of her but didn’t want to show how proud he was to the other men on the train. I don’t think you know much about love.
Or me."

When I read that section I felt like cheering, and hoped that maybe Morrison’s fiction was finally standing up for itself. Go, Frank Money, go! Maybe the characters were trying to peak through and be heard among the bloody din of Morrison’s agenda.

Yes, and I know this sounds disrespectful.

Toni Morrison is �� well, she’s Toni Morrison. She is an American institution; not only a remarkable prose poet and winner of numerous awards, but wielder of a genuine literary conscience, especially in a time when so many American novelists have long since retreated into the safety of irony and approximation. She not only has something to say, but, more importantly, she has people who will listen. She’s not only written some great books but she’s written a few nearly indisputable classics of world literature, like Beloved and Song of Solomon.

But Home is not a wise book. At its heart, it’s more a deceptively angry one. ‘Deceptive�� because of Morrison’s poetics, which can be nimble, funny and evocative but, more often than not here, are overdrawn. Light, for example, never simply shines in this novel. Try to read this without your inner editor scowling: ‘Maniac moonlight doing the work of absent stars matched his desperate frenzy, lighting his hunched shoulders and footprints left in the snow.�� Exactly. So Morrison’s anger comes through in the actions and events rather than in the way they’re described. She keeps her voice out of the fray and lets the anger come out in her choice of putting everyone, basically, through hell.

Which isn’t to say the anger isn’t justified. These are all things that did happen. These are things that, in many ways, still do happen. ‘You could be inside, living in your own house for years, and still, men with or without badges but always with guns could force you, your family, your neighbors to pack up and move �� with or without shoes.�� The novel, in a heavy-handed way, explores the issues of just what kind of home America was, and is, for African Americans; and how horrible it is to read about an innocent African American child being shot in 1950s Chicago at the same time as the US media, some 60 years later, is aflame over the Trayvon Martin case.

There are flashes of hard-won humor and beauty here as well. For example, Prince, Cee’s first love and ill-advised husband, is described as loving himself ‘so deeply, so completely, it was impossible to doubt his convictions��. Or this pitch-perfect dialog between Cee and the wife of Dr. Scott, who is interviewing her for a job:

“Any children?��
“No, ma’am.��
“M�����������?��
“No, ma’am.��
“What church affiliation? Any?��
“There’s God’s Congregation in Lotus but, I don’t …��
“They jump around?��
“M��’a��?��

And Morrison can still control her voice like an instrument, and you’re occasionally reminded that you’re dealing with the author of Beloved, a writer of a fierce and unique American rhythm:

"It was so bright, brighter than he remembered. The sun, having sucked away the blue from the sky, loitered there in the 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 a tenor just passing by. ‘Take me to the water. Take me to the water. Take me to the water. To be baptized.��"


Unfortunately, these moments in Home are few and far between, and what you’re left with is the smallest, shortest big book I think that I’ve ever read. Too many terrible events and too many characters deprived the chance to settle down and breathe without constantly having to suffer their creator’s nefarious intentions. You don’t know much about me, Frank Money insists. And though you know Morrison wrote that, you get the sense that Money was on to something.